Okay, everybody, we're starting.

The September 30th, 2025 special meeting of the City Council is called to order.

This meeting has been properly noticed and posted in compliance with the open meeting law.

Before we proceed with the agenda, would everybody please join me and rise for the Pledge of Allegiance.

We would like to start our meeting today with the swearing in of our interim councilwoman for Ward Two.

Would Cara please join me in the front?

And along with her, I'd like to invite her father, Don Kelly, and her husband, Paul Larson.

We are very pleased that you are here with us today.

And you'll stay to my left.

Okay.

I'm gonna have you on my left.

Okay.

And I understand Mr.

Kelly that you're going to be holding the Bible.

There it is.

We're gonna maybe want to turn you and face that way.

And I don't want to carry your hand the side facing her.

Okay.

Nice.

Okay.

Cara, before I administer the oath, let me tell you how delighted we are that you will be joining the city council.

I know you will be a very conscientious, hardworking councilwoman that will bring good common sense and and sensitivity to your constituents.

So welcome aboard.

Thank you.

All right.

Um please at this time raise your right hand.

I please state your name.

I Carapelli.

Do solemnly swear.

Do solemnly swear.

That I will support, protect, and defend.

That I will support, protect, and defend.

The Constitution and Government of the United States.

The Constitution and Government of the United States.

And the Constitution and Government of the State of Nevada.

And the Constitution and Government of the State of Nevada.

Against all enemies.

Against all enemies.

Whether domestic or foreign.

Whether domestic or foreign.

And that I will bear true faith.

And then I will bear truth faith.

True faith.

Allegiance and loyalty to the same.

Allegiance and loyalty to the same.

Any ordinance, resolution.

Any ordinance, resolution.

Or law of any state notwithstanding.

Or law of any state notwithstanding.

And further, that you are not under any direct or indirect.

And further, that I'm not under any indirect or direct.

Obligation to vote for.

Obligation to vote for.

Appoint or elect.

Appoint or elect.

Any person to any office, position, or employment.

Any person to any office, position, or information.

In the city government of the city of Las Vegas.

In the city government of the city of Las Vegas.

And further, that I will faithfully perform.

The duties of the office on which I am about to enter.

The duties of the office on which I'm about to enter.

And further.

Even more.

That my bona fide address.

That my bona fide is shown herein.

Is shown here in.

And I will immediately and you will immediately notify the city of Las Vegas.

I will immediately notify the City of Las Vegas.

Of any change of address during your term of office.

So help me God.

Congratulations, dear friend.

Congratulations.

Oh congratulations.

All right, let's get to work.

All right.

Oh, wait, wait, wait.

I need to bring everybody up.

Right, right, right.

Well, I'm ready to go to work.

Okay.

I think we did some.

Oh, is this going to be the permanent?

Am I go over there?

No, no.

All right, everyone.

We'll go in three, zero and one.

We'll go in.

Perfect.

Let's do that.

Let's have a picture.

Um more?

Okay.

Great.

Thanks.

And Cara, would you um grab a microphone and say a few words?

Oh, sure.

Thank you.

All right.

I think I have that to see.

Thank you very much, Mayor.

I am humbled.

I'd love to tell you this isn't a big deal, but it really is.

And it's so wonderful to have my father here.

Um and my husband and the rest of my family.

I can't tell you how excited I am.

I keep telling the council folk who I see at events or other things that I'm working hard already, and I'm not gonna let them down, and I'm certainly not gonna let the constituents of Ward Two or the public um the City of Las Vegas residents.

So I'm really excited to be here, and I appreciate really appreciate the support.

And so happy you chose me.

Thank you.

Okay.

Agenda item number eight.

Public comment during this portion of the agenda must be limited to matters on the agenda for action.

The amount of time any single speaker is allowed may be limited.

If anyone wishes to speak under this portion of the agenda, please come forward and state your name for the record.

This is your opportunity to address the council, but the council is not able to respond or engage in dialogue.

Is there anybody that wishes to address the council?

Oh just come on up.

And how are we doing?

Oh, oh, I'm sorry, there's a microphone right over there.

And we will limit uh how many people will be speaking.

Okay, so oh, six people.

Um we'll limit this to one minute each.

Okay, thank you.

Welcome and please state your name.

Hi, my name is Tiffany Stoik.

Um, I'm here to talk about your priorities for public safety for the next three to five years.

I would like to kindly encourage you not to commit public resources to collaborating with ice.

Public safety does not mean unidentified masked men kidnapping people off the streets.

It does mean, however, I'd like to encourage you to consider investing in more public transportation instead.

We know that traffic accidents have been on the rise.

Drunk driving is a very big issue in Las Vegas, and we are the only large metro in the West without light rail, and I think that would actually improve public safety greatly.

Thank you.

Thank you very much, Tiffany.

Hello, welcome and state your name for the record.

Thank you very much.

My name is Jill Glass.

I'm a Las Vegas teacher.

Uh I've been a Las Vegas resident for the past 12 years.

Um I am opposed to the presence of ice in our community.

As a teacher, I've been thinking a lot about what it means to be a hero and to perform acts of bravery.

And I think when we have to put masks on and re and recruit, you know, these guys, these men and women, no age requirements, lucrative sign-on bonuses, and we give them uh arms, bulletproof vests, and masks.

And that just doesn't fit uh my idea of heroism, and it's not the kind of uh model that I would like for our children to learn either.

Um I'm disappointed in uh Governor Joe Lombardo and some of our uh local politicians who have not taken a stronger stand.

And I think as the battle-born state, we had a real opportunity to show strength and independent spirit and to transcend uh partisan politics to do what's right for our community members.

And from where I stand, that includes our immigrant population.

Uh, rather than being a blight on our community, they've been a blessing.

So I hope that everybody on the panel today considers that when they think about the public safety plan for the next five years.

Thank you.

Thank you so much.

Hi there, my name is Sarah Levitt.

Uh, I'm a member of Las Vegas Democratic Socialists of America, and uh I was born and raised here in Las Vegas.

Uh, I want to speak today about your uh priorities for this upcoming five years.

I know that the council often prioritizes public safety, and I want to talk about what public safety is and is not.

Um ICE being in our communities and the city of Las Vegas cooperating with ICE and using city resources.

Uh that doesn't make people feel safe.

I have been doing canvass with people at Broadacres and other areas, and people don't feel safe to go out in public, okay.

Um more policing, more surveillance does not make people safer.

One thing that makes people safer is housing first policy.

If we can get people into housing first, okay, and then address whatever other issues they have going on, like substance abuse, uh, mental health issues, physical health issues.

Um, housing first is really um the gold standard when it comes to getting people off the streets and into a stable life.

So I'd like to see you prioritize housing as uh a way to maintain public safety.

Thank you.

Thank you so much.

Hi there, my name is Logan McMillian.

I've been a member of the Nevada National Guard for the last 13 years, and that means that both y'all and I have sworn an oath to uphold and defend the Constitution and make safe the people of America from threats foreign and domestic.

An easy definition of threats domestic is people who may or may not be law enforcement dressed in unmarked uniforms, driving unmarked vehicles into neighboring states and detaining people with legal authority to do that.

That is unclear, unclarified.

That is easily defined as uh impersonation of a public or of a police officer a felony.

They are then kidnapping those people.

Um I think that's another felony, uh, driving those people across state lines to bring them here to use our Henderson detention facility and corrupt its detention facility.

So I believe that's felony human trafficking, bringing them from California to Nevada, and then continuing to detain these people, hold them without due process, guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment, which you've all just, Miss Kelly, you just swore an oath to uphold the Fourth Amendment, but we're denying these people who may or may not be illegal immigrants.

They might just be American citizens who are brown and speak Spanish, but we're permitting these agents to come into our city, felony traffic human people to our state, and then use our detention facilities in order to house these people.

The the there's a blatant disconnect between a goal of public safety and supporting an alleged agency that is allegedly upholding the law and actively ruining people's lives.

We need to not only divest ourselves of ICE, the state of Nevada and the city of Las Vegas needs to take active measures to stop ICE.

Our judges need to issue federal or issue warrants for their arrest for the crimes they are committing.

Thank you.

Thank you so much.

Hi, my name is Erica Neely as a Latina, uh born and raised here in the United States, California, and moved here to Las Vegas over 20 years.

I'm in support of ICE being in our communities.

I think that public safety is very important.

I support that since we did the um the oath to protect the American people and our citizens comes first.

Protecting our communities is very important.

So I am in support of ICE being in our communities.

Thank you so much.

Thank you so much.

Welcome.

Hi, good morning.

My name is Christian.

Uh I've been here for about a year.

I came from Utah, but when the time that I've been here, I've seen a I've live in an immigrant neighborhood, and I go to the stores, I go to the parks, and I've seen a very big rise in people's fear to be outside, participate in their communities, to contribute economically by going to their work, buying things from local businesses.

I believe having ICE be in our neighborhood and to cooperate with ICE is making it so people can not contribute at all as citizens here.

I think that we need to prioritize the safety of our neighbors by divesting from ICE by working against any sort of um, in my opinion, illegal abduction of others who are simply working, doing their jobs, contributing to their environments, and providing the culture that Las Vegas gets to take advantage of by having them here.

So I want to say I would urge you to please consider divesting from ICE.

Uh consider um decoupling the Metro police with ICE and to consider to allocate those funds toward uh providing housing first initiatives.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

Good morning.

My name is Kimberly Johnston Lindsay.

I'm a constituent.

I'm a parent.

I was a first responder, and I care deeply about the safety of our public.

Support ICE.

Our law enforcement agency needs the support from the from you guys.

We need to uphold the law.

We need to deport illegal criminals that are in our states, and we need to be able to provide a safe space for the citizens of the state of this nation, support ICE, support law enforcement.

They need more support.

They don't need anti-ICE wildness running around out here.

We need to support our law enforcement.

And I'm proud of uh of our Governor Lombardo for standing with President Trump on this matter.

So thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

Hi, good morning.

My name is Sky Pedroza.

Um, I wasn't planning on speaking today, but uh I feel so moved because I'm also a constituent.

Um I've lived in Las Vegas for over 10 years.

My both my children were born here.

Um, and they I'm raising them to speak Spanish.

I know that eventually, once they're part of the school system, they will be speaking English, but now I am afraid that when I go out into public with my children, because ICE is allowed to racially profile, that they will be that we'll be targeted.

And so now I am one of the members of the community who does feel intimidated and afraid to go outside.

And I I would urge you, I plead with you to please divest from that.

I don't want to see that I am I'm one of the many people who feel this way, and I I'm a citizen, I was born here, you know, and I'm just I'm afraid for my children, and what kind of life is that for them?

Thank you very much.

Thank you very much.

Hi, my name is Karen Newcomer.

Um, I've been uh lived in Las Vegas for the last 25 years.

Um I've come from a big law enforcement family, and and I do support, have always been supportive of uh law enforcement in the past, but the things that our Las Vegas Metro Police and our sheriff's department are doing to law-abiding citizens is just terrific.

We have a right to peacefully assemble, we have a right to free speech, but they treat us like criminals.

It's very scary to be out there.

Um recently, uh Mayor, I believe that well, I know that you asked that Canadians could the tourists come back.

If our own citizens are fearful of being out on the streets, think what a full a foreign person would think.

They're they're petrified to come here, they're petrified to come here because of Donald Trump's policies.

And if we act like in this city and we allow our law enforcement to go along with ICE and do their work, then we're complicit in that way that without most of many, many citizens feel like we should not be doing that.

So I just ask that you please do not coordinate or support IS and please protect the citizens of the city.

Thank you.

Thank you so much.

Good morning, Mayor and City Council.

My name is Jill Douglas.

I have lived in this community for 31 years.

I've raised my four sons here.

And I love Las Vegas.

But I'm also concerned when there's, you know, there's what's legal and there's what's illegal.

And I think it's up to our officials to enforce what's legal.

We we cannot start determining that we're going to overlook laws that are on the books.

And I know the one issue that affects everyone.

I mean, some issues affect some people.

The one issue that affects everyone is public safety.

And so we do have to have border security.

There is a difference between immigrants and illegal immigrants.

Illegal does mean that you've broke the law in the way you've come to the country.

So if there's our entities in place that are supposed to protect citizens by enforcing the laws, then I encourage that because I do want our communities to be safe.

Thank you very much.

Thank you very much.

Yes, please.

My name is Victor Shakurchi.

I've been in Las Vegas for 37 years.

Raised uh three children here, went to high school, love Las Vegas.

So my statement is to make sure that Las Vegas demonstrates vision and leadership is to, and in the interest of public safety, that includes our immigrant and brown neighbors.

So bringing ICE here, cooperating with them is only an extension of an authoritarian regime.

And I feel like Las Vegas needs, like I said, to demonstrate leadership and vision.

So you know, we already have 1,200 people unaccounted for that were in the uh alligator Alcatraz.

So if this is any, you know, broad acres is closed.

So if this is any indication of what inviting ICE to our community is, then definitely we need to think about leadership and vision.

Uh one other thing uh I just wanted to mention.

Um, as an American Jew, this is very hard for me to say because um I have family in Israel, but I also feel like in showing leadership, demonstrating leadership and vision, we as Las Vegas should consider cutting ties, uh cultural ties and business ties with Israel until the situation is resolved and this genocide ends.

So thank you.

Is there anybody else that would like to address the city council?

Seeing no one else, I thank everybody for coming and speaking out.

We appreciate it.

And now we will move on to item number six.

Agenda item number six, discussion for possible action regarding identifying and developing new strategic priorities for the city of Las Vegas.

This affects all wards.

Mr.

Jansen.

Good morning, Mayor Berkeley, members of City Council.

For the record, Mike Jansen, city manager.

Uh, let me start off by welcoming Councilwoman Kelly to our team.

We have a great team.

We're thrilled to have you on the team, and I look forward to working with you.

Mayor and Council, uh, February 25th, 2020.

That is the last time we held a special city council meeting to determine what our priorities should be.

And at that meeting, our city council established our current priorities: public safety, health care, and economic diversification.

I can remember some staff questioning why health care was selected as a priority at that meeting.

It wasn't traditionally a priority area that many municipalities focus on.

But I can also remember at that meeting, there was a room full of staff coughing, myself included.

And we would find out a few weeks later, on March 12th of 2020, when Governor Siselak declared a state of emergency due to that COVID pandemic becoming a real, real issue for the whole country.

As we know, shortly thereafter, our unemployment rate uh accelerated to the highest in the country at 33%.

And the rest is history, but we came out of that pandemic stronger as a city, as a community.

And so today, we're here to discuss and establish what your city council priorities are for the next three to five years, so that we can use them in establishing our next strategic plan.

To help us with this very important process today, I'm pleased to introduce Dr.

Tom Riley as our facilitator.

I'd like to share a little bit more with you about Dr.

Riley for those of you that don't know his background.

Tom is well known in our community.

Dr.

Riley is a professor of the School of Public Affairs at Arizona State University.

He previously served as chancellor of the Nevada System of Higher Education.

He was the county manager and CEO for Clark County.

He was the executive director of the Morrison Institute of Public Policy at ASU, and head of Nevada's child welfare system.

He is a fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration and is currently working on his fourth book, Ukraine Stolen Children, Abduction and Forced Transfer in Russia's War.

With that introduction, Mayor and Council, I'm pleased to introduce Dr.

Tom Riley to help us with the next step of today.

Thank you for that introduction and uh mayor and city council, city manager and uh his staff and members of the Las Vegas community.

I am a privilege to be here today.

And uh my first uh task is to introduce your uh keynote speaker today, uh Jeremy Aguero, a very good friend of mine, who I've known for years.

Uh he is the principal analyst and founding partner of applied analysis, an economic fiscal and policy research firm in Las Vegas.

For more than two decades, he has shaped Nevada's growth through data-driven analysis and collaborative policy.

As lead analyst for the Southern Nevada Tourism Infrastructure Committee, he helped secure $750 million for Allegiant Stadium.

He supported the Tesla Gigafactory Expansion and the AIDS project, and he also served as treasurer of the host committee for the Super Bowl 58.

He is co-architect, Nevada's pupil centered funding plan, uh, produced the largest K through 12 funding increase in state history, and help advance campus for hope legislation.

A fourth generation Nevada, he has advised the last six governors.

Aguero serves on the board, including several boards, including Uptony Village, United Way of Southern Nevada, Nevada's Child Seeking Seekers, and RR Partners Foundation.

Honors include Good Government Award and the alumnus of the year from UNLV and the Boyd School of Law.

And with that, Jeremy.

Welcome, Jeremy.

Madam Mayor, it's lovely to see you again, members of the City Council.

Thank you for the invitation to be here today.

I know you have a very long agenda, so I'm going to jump directly into it.

I was asked to give a brief presentation as a primer relative to the discussions that you're going to have today.

Um, a number of conversations uh with the city manager relative to the dialogue that you would have today.

And so uh we sort of talked about three core areas for purposes of our discussion.

First is just a general economic overview.

Where do we see the economy nationally and how is it affecting us here locally?

The city of Las Vegas and its relative positioning as you look forward for the next five years, and then some um key concepts that we believe are going to be important as we move forward.

That having been said, let's start at the beginning with the economic performance indicators.

This is what it looks like since we left the pandemic, as uh was spoken about uh just a little bit ago.

I don't intend to go through each one of these economic indicators.

That would be long for you and long for me and for the audience, but it's enough to look at them and say there's a lot more green on the board than there is red on the board.

We've made a great deal of progress in the past five years, and by most measures, respecting some recent instability, our economy is doing fairly well at the national level.

If we look at it just in terms of the last five years, you'll notice that there's a bit more red on the board.

We've seen a decrease in the level of employment formation, we've seen an increase in the unemployment rate, we've seen some sluggishness in our economy's ability to grow and some other factors that we'll see relative to the housing market and debt as we move forward.

That having been said, if we focus on the biggest of the economic indicators, the one that we must start with is real gross domestic product, the total amount that the United States is producing.

This is a chart that looks at quarter over quarter growth.

You'll notice on the far right-hand side, we have a period of decline and then a period of increase.

I just like to focus on the period of decline first, and then we'll talk about the period of increase.

There was concern that our economy was heading directly into a recession uh during the first quarter.

However, when you look at some of the indicators, they do not necessarily reflect that in any meaningful way.

As a matter of fact, we saw imports drop dramatically, but we saw private investment and public investment actually increase overall as well as consumer spending.

Why in the world would imports decrease?

Because we had a long conversation about tariffs and trade policy change dramatically.

Fast forward to the second quarter when growth occurred and folks said, oh gosh, look, our economy is growing.

Yeah, but it's kind of growing for the wrong reasons.

We saw those imports start to pick up, not because the economy was showing increased performance, but because people were buying everything they could get their hands on in order to make sure that they could get the supplies that they needed coming in.

What is clear is the third quarter will see exactly how those numbers come out.

I suppose that is unclear.

And by the end of my presentation today, there'll likely be different tariff policy than there was when I started my presentation today.

And I am here to make no political commentary whatsoever, other than the fact that that uncertainty is leading to economic data exactly like this, and we should be careful relative to monitoring that.

Our southern Nevada economy, if we look at it pre-pandemic, most of those indicators are green on the right hand side.

We have a greater amount of economic growth.

Our population continues to expand, and we've added a substantial amount of employment.

Nonetheless, there are some challenges.

Either we look at it over the past five years, or whether we just look at over the past year, we've seen an elevated rate of unemployment, the decrease in our population growth overall, and um relative sluggishness in terms of our core tourism industry that we'll talk more about as we continue to go through.

As we continue to analyze these data, I'd like to make mention of the labor force participation rate.

There's a lot of conversation out there about the fact that people just haven't entered the labor force, and that's what's causing the problem.

This is the total rate of uh labor participation for those that are 16 and over, and for those that are 25 to 54, it is roughly at the highest rate we've seen at any time recently.

Those folks are out there actively seeking work.

We know that is taking place.

There is no doubt that we have fewer people available to enter the workforce than we did a year ago.

But nonetheless, the the idea that people just are choosing not to work, simply not the case.

In addition to that, I would be remiss if I did not mention that our employment, like the United States employment, but in some ways even worse, has shown signs of sluggishness.

We have traditionally been among the nation's highest relative to new job formation.

The state of Nevada as of August 2025 was ranked 45th in the United States at 0.3%, showing signs of some instability in the market.

If you look at the total number of jobs that we have created in August of 2025 compared to the same period of the prior year, we're actually negative in terms of that growth with some core areas showing signs that we have concerns.

Our core leisure and hospitality industry continues to grow, albeit our recent signs would suggest that we're seeing layoffs as well as reductions in hours.

But the one that has us most concern is actually the construction in the bottom left-hand side.

Construction by its very nature has a tendency to be cyclical.

We've seen a reduction in the total number of construction related activities, and it's not all it's both the greatest number of reduction in workforce as well as the greatest percentage reduction reduction in for in workforce.

Since the pandemic, the city of Las Vegas has added back every job that was lost during the pandemic and some additional ones.

You can see the uptick just for the city alone in terms of its employment numbers.

These are remarkable.

Unsustainable, excuse me.

The city has reported 46 months of consecutive growth and relative strength in terms of job formation as the city continues to strive toward a reasonable and equitable uh jobs housing balance overall.

That having been said, if we look at the unemployment rate, it is elevated in Nevada, it is elevated in southern Nevada.

At the top are the states that have the lowest unemployment rate, are the ones on the bottom are the states with the bottom the highest rate of unemployment, and you can see that the state of Nevada ranks among the highest in the United States in terms of that rate of unemployment.

Of course, Washington, D.C.

being affected by changes that we're seeing.

I am mindful, I know someone will come up and tell me Washington, D.C.

is not a state.

I know it's not a state.

We use it for purposes of this presentation.

If we look at the seasonally uh, excuse me, non-seasonally adjusted unemployment for the city of Las Vegas is now at six percent.

That is elevated from where we would like to see it and where it has been historically overall.

This combination of economic factors is leading to greater uncertainty among consumers.

We talked about it at the outset.

Consumer sentiment is now at 58.2.

This is according to the University of Michigan that reports this uh every month.

And if you see it, our consumer sentiment is actually lower than it was during the pandemic, or roughly on par where it was during the pandemic and certainly lower than what we saw during most of the Great Recession.

The combination of those two things is leading to consumers acting differently and being concerned about what happens next uh overall.

If we look at consumer confidence, we tend to break it into two component parts.

One is are you better off today than you were a year ago?

Most folks in the United States do believe they're better off, although you can see even some of those statistics are starting to fall downward relative to this.

Perhaps more important to us here in Southern Nevada and certainly in the city of Las Vegas is the second half of that same survey.

Or do you expect to be better off six months from now than you are today?

Those numbers are very low, lower than they were during the pandemic.

The consumers are worried about two things.

One, cost of living, second to the tariffs, and those two things have a tendency to be highly linked to one another, but consumers being concerned during a period of relative prosperity certainly has us concerned overall.

That first reason for that concern is not ambiguous in any way, shape, or form.

This is the consumer price index from December of 2018, sort of in the post-pandemic era in which the cost of things have gone up by almost 30%.

And to be clear, uh inflation is a recession, is a regressionary tax on consumers.

The lower your income level, the greater the rate of inflation will impact you.

And 30% is nothing to uh uh uh to turn a blind eye to.

It is significant.

If we break down the cost of living in southern Nevada into its component parts, these are the major ones here.

Again, we have a great deal to talk about, so I'm not gonna spend a whole lot of time going through this, although we'll touch on a few of the key ones.

Our cost of living in Southern Nevada today is actually roughly 5% below the average reported by major metropolitan areas.

The cost of housing is roughly on par overall, but things like the cost of transportation are higher than the vast majority of major metropolitan areas where others are certainly showing some signs of increasing.

We continue to be relatively competitive today relative to aggregate cost of living.

But again, I would suggest to you that there is a high bifurcation within our community.

There are those that are doing very well and those that aren't, and the number in between is getting smaller and smaller and smaller.

If we look at taxable retail sales in the United States, we believe that consumer confidence going down would lead us to consumers spending less money.

We are not seeing that in the United States today, although we do expect it to happen as the economy begins to slow down.

But I wanted to draw this as a sharp contrast to what we are seeing in southern Nevada and really the state of Nevada today, as taxable retail spending continues to decline.

A decrease in consumer uh capability in terms of available disposable income combined with a reduction in tourism related activity, which of course contributes substantially to taxable retail sales in southern Nevada, and then on top of that, a slowdown in construction related activity in Nevada, construction materials are subject to retail sales and use tax, has led to this curve we see on the right-hand side.

That means less money for the state.

It means less money for local governments, for everything from schools uh to public safety.

Year over year, the United States is up 4.8%.

Nevada is down 2.9%, and Clark County is down 2.4%.

We do expect continued instability in taxable retail sales.

Americans losing faith in hard work gains, uh leads uh to economic gains.

This has been a sentiment that we've seen.

And what we've also seen is that Americans are reducing the amount that they are saving as they are also getting squeezed relative to their available income and being able to sustain the level of consumption that I showed you previously.

As a matter of fact, if we look at the 50-year average relative to the savings rate in the United States, it is about 7.3%.

We are sub-5% today, something we certainly don't want to be.

The reason for that is largely because the United States is at or near the highest rate of debt that we have seen in United States history overall.

This shows mortgage debt, auto loan, student loans, credit cards, and then other household debt.

It is at the highest level.

Consumers are continuing to borrow to maintain the level of spending that we've seen previously.

If we look at it between over really the last 20 years, the increase in that debt matters to us in the United States.

It matters to us here in Southern Nevada.

If we look at all of these and look at the rate of growth that we have seen in those over the past 20 years, it points to some unsustainability to that and real problems for the American consumer.

Compounding that problem is as debt has gone up.

We have now started to see an uptick in the delinquency rate for all loan types in the United States.

We can break that down perhaps more helpfully by looking at the various categories.

We see that mortgages default rates have started to tick up with some pre-foreclosure related activity showing signs of weakness.

Probably more important than that are the shorter term loans associated with automobiles.

Then we see student loans, which have been recently required to be paid back.

And so this is not that surprising.

But the one that keeps us up at night, of course, is credit card debt, which we've seen a substantial uptick in delinquency, potential most notably among younger Gen Z and millennial households.

We combine that with the reality of the segmentation, the economic segmentation of our nation, and it leads us to a real concern relative to the sustainability of the prosperity that we've had over the past five years in the United States and certainly here in Southern Nevada.

The chart on the left-hand side shows household wealth, roughly 160 trillion, 165 trillion dollars worth of wealth in the United States.

110 of that is held by the top 10% of households.

Draw this in sharp contrast to where that credit card debt that we just looked at exists, and you can see that on the right-hand side where households 50% uh of the bottom 50% of all households uh have 2.6 trillion of the total amount of credit card debt.

If we compare and contrast where the wealth is in the United States and where the debt is in the United States, this by its very definition is not sustainable.

We look at those net worth disparities.

We look at it by education level, we look at it uh again, college educated citizens account for 75% of all wealth.

What about by generation?

The baby boomers have acquired a huge amount of the wealth and their decision to pass it on where it's going to be, both Gen Z and millennials are behind where their parents and grandparents actually were at the same amount of time.

If we look at it by race, white households uh control a substantially higher than their proportional share of that household wealth, all of that is putting stress on our economic system.

If we take these general economic truisms and then we apply them to the city of Las Vegas and the things that affect the city most directly, I've picked four of them.

We probably could have spent uh a lot more time talking about things in more detail.

But when we think about it in terms of population growth, investment, development related activity, and then the city's assets and their performance, it gives us a pretty good idea of I think where things are heading, both cyclically and structurally.

Right?

If we look at it, you know, 60, 70, 80 years ago, we've grown from a community of about 16,000 people to a community of 2.4 million people, and we did it faster than almost anywhere else in the United States.

If you look at it in terms of fast growing cities versus slow growing cities, both of them have merits.

I don't think there's any criticism, but going from a fast growing community to a slow growing community is very difficult because both our economy and our fiscal system is geared for growth.

We are not like New York, we are not like Chicago.

Those places took hundreds of years to get to the same place that we are today.

This is what our population looks like.

This is what the population growth looks like.

Again, that population growth has been relatively solid in those non-COVID, non-recessionary years.

If we look at that population growth, there's a general expectation that that's going to continue.

But recent data has suggested some sluggishness, some decreases, some concern relative to those migration data.

On the left-hand side are the most recent data that we have for driver's license surrenders.

When you move to Southern Nevada, you surrender your driver's license from California, Texas, Florida, wherever you come from, we can count those.

You can see that the level of those driver's license surrenders has dropped.

Now, that doesn't count the number of people that have left our community.

It's only the people that are moving in.

And the drive the electric meter connections remain relatively high overall.

But we have seen a substantial decline in the people that are moving in to our community.

Those driver's license surrenders are continuing to come from California, drawing a sharp distinction between the people who are here and the people who are who are moving in.

For the first 20 years, I did what I do for a living.

The people moving into southern Nevada had a lower income than the people who lived here.

For the past five years, those numbers have switched.

What we've seen is a substantial amount of income flowing in, buying up homes, putting upward pressure on prices, taking jobs, some of those type of things that exist out there.

This is the city of Las Vegas' historical population.

This is that growth rate overall looking very similar to the valley.

Nonetheless, we are concerned.

One of the sets of data that we commonly look at are U-Haul related data.

You get a U-Haul to move from Sacramento to Las Vegas or from Dallas to Reno.

Whatever.

We used to be in the top five in terms of points of destination.

Last year we were number 11.

We've now dropped to number 35 in that particular category.

I mentioned earlier construction related activity from an economic standpoint, creating some degree of concern.

This is new and resale homes for the city of Las Vegas.

You can see that those price increases, even with the instability that we have continue to put an uptick.

We've also seen some downward pressure on the volume of new supply.

Nonetheless, if we look at our urban valley and we look at that median closing price during the last calendar year for which we have data, we can certainly see a distinction between neighborhoods, between areas, between quadrants, if you will, of the community.

By contrast, if we look at that home resale appreciation, you'll notice that these numbers are changing just a little bit.

If we look at the home price appreciation rate, you'll notice that the areas that have a tendency to have the lower, more affordable priced homes, are actually the ones today seeing the greatest rate of price appreciation, something we're keeping a very close eye on overall.

If we hone in on the city of Las Vegas, there is so much to talk about in terms of the city.

Obviously, the city is not one jurisdiction, not one place, not one area, not one group of people.

But this mix relative to housing and the and the and the difficulty in terms of being able to afford that housing is critical.

In addition to that, the national rate of home ownership is 67.2% overall.

This is the top five states in the United States relative to homeownership rate where more people have the ability to own a home.

I'm sure you can see just by looking at my map, those areas that fall at the bottom.

Nevada ranks among the highest, and with Southern Nevada accounting for about 74% of the state's population, the fact that we rank 58th in terms of, excuse me, 48th with 59 uh percent of the population being a homeowner is certainly a concern in terms of long-run stability.

And it's become increasingly more expensive as incomes have been divergent from the cost of housing.

In 1990, you took you about eight years to be able to save for a home.

By the time you got to 2015, that was about 11 years.

And here in 2025, in this Las Vegas MSA, at the current savings rate and the current cost and the current income, it will take you roughly 19 years to be able to save up enough money to buy a median priced home.

Which means you can afford a home about the time your kids are going to physically leave the house.

Not okay for us given the fact that the Nevada dream, the American dream, is what brought so many people here.

Importantly, housing attainability is not an issue that is unique to Southern Nevada, and I don't want to leave anyone with that impression.

Maine has the highest rate of affordability, Delaware the lowest rate of affordability.

This is where we fall today with 70, almost 80% of households unable to afford a median priced home.

The national average is about 75% in terms of the total, and there is not a single state in the United States where a median household can afford a medium priced home.

Again, it's a national problem that is acutely manifest here in Southern Nevada.

Hard for us is the reality that the Las Vegas income gap is nearly $50,000 in additional income needed to be able to afford a home in Southern Nevada.

You can see where it was.

In terms of occupations in Southern Nevada, only 6.1% of those.

Mayor, City Council members, I think that as we continue to go forward, there's a concern that we are building houses for people that are moving here, and we are we are building affordable housing for the people who live here.

Challenge for us.

If we look at it on the lower end of the spectrum, which we could probably spend a great deal of time having that conversation, the minimum wage at 12 an hour, you would have to work 191 hours a week to be able to afford a home.

There are obviously 24 hours in every day.

I suppose someone could figure out how to work all of those because they didn't need any sleep.

However, there's only 168 hours in an entire week, so you would somehow have to build a new day called after day in order to be able to actually get to 191 hours.

Again, it has everything to do with the wealth disparity that we looked at before.

In addition, oftentimes this is somehow attributable to the negligence among the home building industry.

I don't think that is right in any way, shape, or form.

I think the home builders would love to be able to build more houses because that's what they do for a living.

And what you can see is that the cost of the how of housing has gone up.

I just want to share with you where we were in the fourth quarter of 2024, where we're where we are in the first quarter of 2025, relative to the cost per square foot to construct it.

Single family high end has certainly gone up.

But certainly in the lower end for housing, the cost associated with construction itself for single family homes for multifamily homes has gone up dramatically.

Cost of labor, the cost of materials, obviously the cost of land.

Residential permits in the city of Las Vegas, single family on the left, multifamily on the right.

The supply side challenge is also a concern for us as we bring on less product means you're going to put upward pressure overall.

You can see the total level of the units.

It's not enough to keep pace.

Multifamily permit valuation, right?

This is what it looked like early on.

This is what it looks like today in terms of that aggregate volume.

Those prices are going up, and at the end of the day, we'll make it cost prohibitive for many people even to afford or to stay in the apartment that they have.

This is the new home market and multifamily share as a percentage of total sales.

It is increased as we've seen a push toward density overall.

This is what that new home market looks like in terms of the change per square foot, in terms of larger, mid-size, and then of course very small units pushing upward in order to have micro lots to be able to increase the supply of housing that's out there.

This is the share of homes within with three or more stories also increasing the trend that we're seeing in real estate overall.

Major projects matter, investment in those projects matter, but we are dead last in the United States for housing units for extremely low income renters, putting upward pressure on homelessness and other challenges.

And again, I don't want to leave you with the impression for a moment that this is a low-income exclusive challenge that we have in Southern Nevada.

It very much is not.

This is rent burdened by area median income.

And what you'll see is that the darker gray, excuse me, green areas are those in the United States.

The ones in the lighter gray is the state of Nevada, much of which is us here in Southern Nevada.

You will see that middle income on the far right hand side of our chart has a substantially higher share of the population that is rent-burdened than we see across the United States, almost double in that regard overall, which we did not see previously.

If we look at the number of multifamily permits that are being issued per 10,000 people, even with our population growth still being above the national average, you can see that these numbers are lower.

And what that means is less supply physically coming online.

It's becoming increasingly difficult for very obvious reasons.

Combine that with the fact that asking rents per unit are now approaching $1,500 in the urban valley.

Again, I think you can see where those rents are if we just sort of look at that map relative to where the darker colors versus the lighter colors are, and then we compare and contrast that against some of the media coverage that has been very good in this particular issue, but is highly focused on the fact that rental prices are coming down, and they are.

I would respectfully submit this could be a growing challenge for us in Southern Nevada, including here at the city of Las Vegas.

You get it in terms of the vacancy rates.

I won't spend a bunch of time there.

This is the city of Las Vegas asking rent per unit.

This is the vacancy rate overall.

Vacancy rates are starting to come down a little bit.

Rents have remained relatively stable overall.

In terms of development related activity, again, as important as anything that we've seen, you've seen this chart a hundred times.

I just like to show it because my wonderful team created it, and I think it kind of looks cool, and it always sort of makes the point that the federal government is sort of the lead uh dog in this race relative to determining whether land is going to be released.

And I understand that there are environmental issues.

I understand that there are water issues.

The balancing of those can be absolutely critical.

The ability to make sure that we have land so we can build housing for people that live here is critical.

In addition to that, I would at least be I would be remiss if I did not mention these uh the multi-species uh habitat conservation plan and the de facto land development boundary that we have in Southern Nevada.

That allows for up to 145,000 acres to be disturbed within the urban valley.

We have already disturbed nearly 130,000 of those acres, meaning we have about 16,000 acres remaining.

Historically, we have absorbed land at about 5,000 acres per year, meaning that we have three to five uh years left before we effectively run out of land.

Now, to be clear, we will reduce the amount of land that we absorb.

It will become more expensive.

We will extend that out, but this is exactly what we're seeing today overall.

Within the urban valley, there are 172, 173,000 acres of land.

The county has about 45% of that, the city another 26%, Henderson and North Las Vegas rounding out the balance overall.

That is what our urban valley looks like.

If we look at those cumulative acres developed during that period, you can see the speed at which we have absorbed that land between 1980 and 2024.

Um, you can also see that the amount of that acreage that's being absorbed has come down, but it is not low.

And if we uh if we look at uh the total acres in terms of what has been developed during that period on average versus what we are seeing today, there is no doubt we are being more efficient with what we are developing overall.

That said, look at the development activity that is taking place within the city of Las Vegas, right?

We we look at it in terms of the 1960s, 70s, in terms of what that development looks like, and what you see is that we are bordering directly on that, and the speed at which we developed in the 90s and 2000s, simply not sustainable today overall.

Perhaps of equal importance is what it is that the city is developing.

This is the city of Las Vegas in terms of its land use mix.

You see residential being the darker color there, commercial, industrial, and then other.

If you look at it between 2000, uh the five years ending 2000, it was 70 percent residential.

Now it's 88 percent residential.

That jobs housing balance, um, I would respectfully submit matters in terms of all of this, largely because the cost of providing services to residents is much higher than the cost of providing services to things like commercial buildings, if you will.

By contrast, this is what the county sort of has looked like leading up to five to 2000 and where it is today, where that balance is a little bit different, certainly putting fiscal pressure on uh this uh this city.

This is that inventory of industrial space, this is the inventory of retail space, uh, excuse me, office industrial and retail uh shown here, all of which have continued to increase, albeit showing much slower, much side uh a number of signs of slowing in terms of that inventory.

We're glad to see both the the all the vacancy rates for office retail and industrial all be relatively low, but we are certainly concerned about the uptick in industrial vacancy we've seen recently and the ability to continue to attract some of those at the fees and the costs that are currently necessary to sustain the developments that have taken place.

The combination of increasing rates, excuse me, increasing vacancy and decreasing rates is something we're keeping a close eye on.

As I mentioned before, this is the total amount of acreage.

Uh I'm now going all the way back to 1970 as opposed to 1980.

This is the amount of vacant acres that we now have in the urban valley.

Again, the these multi-species habitat conservation cap not coming into play.

You see the city of Las Vegas has about 14,000 acres remaining.

If we only look at the private land, it is only about 8,000 acres.

And so where growth has largely defined us for the next last hundred years.

The ability for growth to define the city of Las Vegas for the next hundred years is extremely limited.

This is that what that vacant land curve looks like for the city of Las Vegas.

You can see how much it has truly come down during that period overall.

Publicly owned vacant land, privately city of Las Vegas.

I know this uh uh uh body is well aware in terms of what has been planned and programmed on this property would have been um uh takes a long time to go through this, but the pieces that are not currently subject to a development agreement are relatively limited overall.

If we look at vacant land costs, it is now six hundred and eighty-two thousand dollars an acre.

It has come down slightly, which has more to do with the mix of property than it does uh the total value, and we're expecting that to continue to go up as the supply side continues to be problematic.

In closing, talking about the city's assets and to some degree mobility.

I mentioned earlier the concept of cost of living, um, transportation uh is among the highest anywhere in the United States and among the highest here in Southern Nevada.

Why is that?

The cost of registration, among the highest in the United States, the cost of gasoline is high, the cost of insurance, oops, is relatively high in terms of those totals.

We also have relatively uh few other options relative uh to transportation.

Not very many people are going to take the bus to get everywhere they need to go, and the pressure that is put on side of that on top of that is problematic for us overall.

71% of the city of Las Vegas residents drive alone to work.

The commune time is 28 minutes, which is relatively good for us overall.

You can see the share of folks that take uh public transit while is incredibly important for seniors and veterans and many people that are trying to get to work.

The reality is those percentages on the left-hand side are relatively small, and the amount of money that's available is limited.

$5.5 billion in terms of the projection pipeline in terms of some of those costs.

Again, I'm not gonna try and go through each one of these, other than to say the transportation mobility and the ability for people to either get to Southern Nevada or to be able to get from point A to point B becomes incredibly important to what we are trying to accomplish as a community.

Those assets in terms of the city of Las Vegas.

I I think the prosperity that this city is experiencing over today and and really for the past decade has so much to do with the people that came before us, this city council, and those that sat in those seats uh before you.

I won't even attempt to try and go through all of these.

But the fact that you identified and developed a medical district, the fact that we have a medical school there, the fact that downtown has transitioned so significantly from where it was two decades ago to where it is today, and that Fremont Street and uh all of these things are taking place is relatively remarkable.

To bring it all together in terms of answering the final question in terms of looking forward, what ultimately does it mean?

I would offer just a few elements in terms of what we're seeing, what these are going to have.

What impact they are likely to have on our community.

I would uh provide respectfully the recommendation that the city council consider what it looks like if we're gonna have slower growth or even no growth.

I think that there's a mounting sentiment around uh growth and what it means and what its impacts are, right?

The idea that, hey, I I can't build a pool so the next person can move in because we need the water for things like that.

We're hearing that kind of sentiment across the board.

Number two is balancing economic development with things like water uh conservation.

There is no doubt water continues to go down, Lake Mead.

We have a single source of water uh here, and while we are well protected because of the return flow credits and the fact when water cannot continue down the Colorado, we can continue to churn that should not be mistaken with the fact that we are in a water crisis in Southern Nevada today, and the ability to conserve and balance that with our economic development needs is going to be critically important to Southern Nevada.

Number three, I would offer the recommendation that aligning economic diversification and development.

There's a common discussion that economic diversification and development are the same thing.

I would respectfully submit that they are not.

Economic diversification is largely about bringing that next business into the city of Las Vegas or into Southern Nevada, where economic development is ensuring that the businesses that are already here have a prosper can can be prosperous in terms of the economic environment.

A lot of our focus in the state of Nevada has been about making those changes, protecting the businesses that are here, maybe the most important thing we have to deal with over the next uh 10 years.

Linking economic and fiscal diversification, right?

We have made great efforts toward diversifying our economy.

We have made almost no efforts toward diversifying our fiscal system.

We are seeing that today in terms of our tourism-based economy.

We're seeing it in terms of a sales tax that is principally almost exclusively tangible goods sold at retail, not services that exist.

We are overly dependent on tourism taxes, we are overly dependent on construction-related taxes, and as those two industries show signs of weakness, so too will the state of Nevada and local governments.

The realities of AI, automation, government services, all of these, I'm sure you could spend, we could spend the rest of our natural lives having this conversation.

I believe that AI is going to cure cancer.

I also believe it's going to lead to a 20% unemployment rate.

And I say both of those things being somewhat tongue-in-cheek to offer that here, but our world is changing in a remarkably fast way.

Our ability to adapt to it and think differently about how we do everything is critical.

I would also offer that as you go forward, finding a way to solve the PERS challenge seems to me to be incredibly important to the city of Las Vegas and our communities, our state's ability to remain a going concern.

The challenge is remarkable in that regard.

We've made promises.

We have some of the best uh public employees anywhere in the United States.

I think those promises need to be kept for them.

The ability to be able to keep them is going to be uh making that more sustainable as we continue to go forward.

Um, I would uh offer that continuing the effort toward building a stronger health care economy.

This has been the nation's fastest growing sector.

The fact that the city of Las Vegas had the foresight to make the investments that it has and some of the very innovative things that are doing that you all are doing today to try and bring in new health care, finding ways for public-private partnership.

We know that baby boomers have a lot of the money.

We know that they're aging, and the two things they're gonna do with all that money is try to live forever and take vacations.

Hopefully, that will help us in one way or another, but we got a lot of work to do.

I would also suggest that the resilience and the resurgence of the downtown area, the Fremont Street District, the amount of investment by almost every measure that we see in tourism-related activity and otherwise, it is paying off for this community.

It has changed, it has become a brand new cultural icon for us overall.

The the higher order transit mobility and transit corridors, we are going to need to move people differently than we did before.

There are some innovative technologies that are happening, but being able to make this sustainable, finding ways to get that transportation to people so that they can get to work.

It's something we have we have strived to do, but we still have a very, very long way to go overall.

And then finally, I think I would offer the fact that there is a state-local power shift, I think that is taking place uh today in the state of Nevada, term limits, uh the shift in terms of uh how legislation gets done, the call the conversation between home rule and the Dillon's rule and all of those type of things.

The tension between the state and local governments tends to be them against us.

It needs to be all of us together, right?

And it's not always that way.

Making sure that local governments are ahead of this curve and are on our those true partners is important.

I realize that the entirety of your day today is about what happens next.

I'm hopeful that at least some of the foundation that I've laid and some of the data is helpful as you go through that exercise.

And for um just one person that's a fourth generation Southern Nevada, and I just want to say thank you to you uh for everything that you all do every single day.

Sometimes I'm sure many times it's a thankless job.

And I will tell you there's a lot of people that are out there that know uh what this city council is doing and what it has done and are very proud to live in the this community as a result of that.

Thank you very much.

We have about 10 minutes for a QA, you know, any questions if we could, and we'll be on target.

So, Jeremy, if you don't mind, uh we're gonna ask for a few questions.

Okay.

Would anybody care to ask Jeremy a question?

Yes, uh, Mayor Pro Teb.

Thank you very much for the presentation.

Thank you, sir.

Um, we've been able to work together for the last couple of years on what I would consider some pretty transformational projects related specifically to housing, transitional housing, transportation, health care, mental health care in particular.

Um I guess the question I have for you is given the fact that you've worked for six governors or you've worked with six governors.

I see opportunity right now.

You just painted a somewhat of a bleak picture.

But what are the factors that led to the opportunities over the last couple of years, specifically around what you've worked on?

Um, Mayor Protebus, it's a hard question.

Um I'll do my best to try and answer it.

Um in my view, this community can do absolutely anything it puts its mind to.

And right now, we don't seem to have that thing that we're all going to get behind and go get done.

I think that's the hardest thing is to build consensus.

We all point to the things that divide us.

We don't focus on the 90% of things that we all agree in in this community that we need to get done.

When you talk about major economic development deals, right, I think that those start with, and you and I've had this conversation a lot, a sound business plan.

It has to make logical sense.

This is why we need a medical district, this is why we need those employees, this is why this investment is going to make sense for the city of Las Vegas.

It needs to pass the test of being right.

The second piece is I think you have to have legislation drafted, I think you have to have a sound financial model, but you also need to have a champion.

And in absence of having that champion that's going to say, I am willing to roll up my sleeves and get it done, nothing gets done.

And then beyond that, I think it's looking in the mirror and being very real with ourselves relative to the challenge that we have.

I love to say that this community loves to admire its challenges, right?

Ooh, look at that one.

It's really bad over there.

Somebody should go take care of that, right?

We love to do that.

But when we identify one of those, things like education, right?

In 2019, state of Nevada restructures its education funding to ensure that every dollar that is dedicated to education actually goes to education.

In 2023, Governor Lombardo, along with the legislature, passes the greatest single increase in education funding.

Why?

Because there was no more argument about the fact that if we put money into education, it doesn't actually go to education, right?

The third piece, in in 2025, the majority leader, Democrat majority leader of the Senate and the Republican governor come together on an accountability measure that I am going to argue maybe the single most important element that we've ever done relative to K-12 education because it makes certain that teachers uh fulfill their obligation and that the school board fulfills its obligation and and administrators fulfill their obligation, right?

The the point here is that the structural elements associated with it.

We always want to fix all the problem at once.

If we can identify what the source of the problem is and go after that and then work on it, work on it, work on it.

At some point, I have I'm always concerned about this community being complacent.

And so from that standpoint, it is this idea that we have to go, go, go, go, go.

But the other side is some very smart people have impressed upon me to embrace the merits of incrementalism, right?

If we can take good steps in the right direction, we are gonna get where we want to go.

And so if you ask me over the past 10 years how we've had success in terms of economic development, how we've made some of these changes, I think it is really two things.

I think it is number one, this community not being afraid to come together, and and it's in its absolute ability to go get that done.

And number two is the ability to actually boil it down to the cause, to the cause.

So we are focused on the virus and not the symptoms.

If I can ask one more question, that's exactly the answer I was looking for, and thank you for putting it on the record.

Um, I guess the second question is is you laid out a whole bunch of data.

There's a whole bunch of challenges in our community.

I see opportunities.

What are your recommendations for this council?

How do you think we should act?

Um look, uh I think act with ambition and act with your heart, right?

I mean, I think the challenge that we are dealing with, the challenges that we're dealing with today, um, their order of magnitude is increasing because of myriad factors that are out there, right?

We're we're seeing a sluggishness in the United States economy, not because anybody did anything wrong, but because we pumped 5.3 trillion dollars into the economy and now during stimulus, and now those dollars aren't there anymore, and that's causing everything to slow down.

We also have a group of folks that are aging in and a group of folks that are aging out.

We have a tourism industry that is struggling with the fact that you know international travelers aren't so excited about coming to the United States these days, and the combination of that with increase in pricing is created a chilling effect, right?

What I would offer here is that it's about again two things leadership and partnership.

Don't be afraid.

If there's something you want to go fix, go fix it.

And and if there's anything I can do or others can do, I would guess we'll be right behind you to try and pull that rope as far as we can.

Leadership and partnership, because you can't do it alone, right?

This community, this tourism industry needs this community, right?

It needs this community to welcome those visitors to find ways to enhance our tourism economy.

This community needs those next healthcare professionals to move in.

We need that.

They're not gonna be able to do it on their own.

That's the reality of the situation we've created.

And you and I have had a number of these conversations about the structural changes.

We can attack those every single day.

But what I would the recommendation that I would be is be ready for change and be ambitious in terms of how you go forward.

Don't be scared.

This community's behind you.

Thank you.

Yes, sir.

Yes, Nancy.

Thank you for the presentation.

I have a question about one of your sides.

Uh it looks like 22.8% of the total uh new home markets are multifamily.

Uh, does that include both condos and apartments?

I I think the one you're looking at there, and again, I can circle back with you just to make sure we're looking at the same thing.

I think what you're looking at there has to do with the condo market, but I'll come back and make sure that we have those.

Can you share a little bit about what you're seeing nationally with respect to the condo market?

I know Governor Lombardo has allocated about 84 million dollars for multi-family, really focusing on condo development, which we haven't done for a while.

But I would argue that condos uh might be a more affordable product, so you're addressing the affordability, and you can own them, so it's really getting at the home ownership, which as you mentioned, we're pretty far down on the list in terms of home home ownership.

So, what are you seeing nationally with respect to the condo market?

And then what are you what are opportunities here given Governor Lombardo's legislation or funding?

Um first of all, thank you for the question.

Um, from a national standpoint, what we are seeing is a pivot over to um uh smaller uh units across the board, condos being one of those, right?

That affordability challenge is real.

The hard part, councilwoman, is is also the consumers are behaving differently in terms of what they want, right?

The typical homeowner is about 38 years old uh today.

That's almost a decade.

Well, not quite that, but uh that's much older than it was about five years ago, and so there's somewhat of a change in that.

In addition to that, what we're seeing is that the income of younger generations is having a hard time keeping up.

And so right now, the home builders are pivoting over to the folks that actually have the capital to go get it done.

So while they're focused on that, I think it's important, right?

I don't know that it necessarily solves the problem you and I would want it to solve.

You asked about the governor and the legislature and the passage of the programs around haze uh housing attainability, which I think changed the game by increasing the threshold in which those dollars can be made affordable all the way up to 120% of AMI.

That changes who can afford what, including those condos.

Now, obviously, you're always gonna have the concerns over things like construction defect and the reason that those slowed down previously.

Again, I'm not here to make any political commentary, but as we go through that exercise, there is no doubt that home builders want to come out and build a different mix of product.

There is no doubt that throughout the United States and here in Southern Nevada, entry-level housing doesn't exist anymore the way that it did when we were all growing up.

Obviously, I'm older than many of you, but when we were all growing up, right?

It didn't i there was this thing called entry level housing, right?

That we don't have anymore relative to that.

I think those builders want to do that.

I think some of these smaller builders are going to line up to utilize those incentives that the governor and the legislature, I think in their wisdom came forward with, right?

Is it going to be enough?

Not even close.

Not even close.

Thank you, councilwoman.

Councilwoman Kalensky.

Thank you, Madam Mayor.

Um Jeremy, thanks for being here today.

I could listen to you talk all day.

You're always full of such good information.

Uh one of the things, well, your slide deck was great, uh, that popped out to me is the consumer sentiment, consumer confidence slide.

And your words about the lack of home rule for local government.

Four out of the seven of us are previously elected uh state lawmakers, so we understand the pull, and you're right about your observations.

It's not so much a partisan uh difference when the legislature's in session, it really is a governmental difference.

Uh and uh the struggle is real.

Uh my question to you, because most of our budgets that the legislature has to approve uh is based on C tax, and C tax is so firmly entrenched with sales tax.

How do we move the needle with consumer confidence?

Um easy question.

The reality is I think we have both moving the needle with consumer confidence is going to change require a change in the mindset of the United States, and I think for many people to get off of social media, right?

I think the reality, I'll say it out loud.

I don't have a problem, right?

I think the reality that that um in today's day and age, we are inundated with confirmation bias surrounding what we see and the fear that people have of the economic situation is problematic for us.

The number of people that get their news from um X or TikTok or or or Instagram is much higher than it used to be.

And I used to make jokes about that.

I don't make jokes about that anymore, because that's the reality of where these folks are getting that.

And when that news is being curated based on how you scroll and what things you click on, it becomes problematic.

Right.

We looked at that statistic relative to are you doing better off than you were a year ago versus where you are today.

We never saw an advent of that kind of separation between those two statistics in a pre-social media um environment.

And again, I think social media does a lot of wonderful things.

I'm not here to be entirely negative relative to that.

But the fact of the matter is that the more that confirmation bias can drive that negativity, I think it's going to continue to do that.

We cannot ignore the fact that there's also huge levels of uncertainty.

Again, I offer no political commentary whatsoever.

But the fact that every day it's a new tariff, every day it's a new policy, every day it's something in the news.

Well, whether it has to do with immigration or anything else that is leaving people concerned about what their position in the world is going to be, right?

That uncertainty every day is there is a there's a collateral damage associated with that.

And it is those that consumer related activity that is taking place.

Now, I I suppose the hope of many is that over the long run we will be in a better place than we are today.

But when you're looking at those consumer confidence, we cannot ignore the fact that they are both structural and they are cyclical.

From a from a structural standpoint, consumers are starting to be concerned because roughly 40% of households could put a foul put their hands on a thousand dollars if they needed to today.

That is frightening to me overall.

That level of debt is at the highest level it's ever been.

How in the world do our kids get ahead?

I think that the people that are answering that question are dealing with the reality that we may be the first generation in history to do better than our parents and better than our children.

God help us if that's the case.

Those are real structural concerns that we have set up today.

Layer on top of that, the cyclicality associated with the fact that economies go up and economies come down, and we are less prepared for that today than we've ever been.

Households have huge amounts of debt.

Corporations are concerned that they've increased costs to a level that are problematic, and the United States government is sitting on 36 trillion dollars worth of debt and just passed over the Ferguson line, which means that we are spending more money on the interest to our debt than we are spending on national security.

Not okay.

Not okay for us as a country.

And so I think those consumers are right in terms of the way that they feel, and until we deal with those structural issues and those cyclical issues, we're in trouble.

Mayor, is it uh we have but time for like one more question?

Is that okay?

Um uh Tom, with all due respect, I have to let everyone of our city council people ask a question.

Uh Ms.

Summers Armstrong.

Thank you, Madam Mayor, and thank you so much for the presentation, Mr.

Aguero.

Um I've lived in Las Vegas for 35 years and uh worked in government for 26, and I can remember meetings uh in the conference room at the Regional Transportation Commission, and there was always perpetual discussion about the the growing our economy and and diversifying our economy, and we seem to make moves to get there, but the moment that our overall economy in the nation gets a little shaky, we entrench again in what we already know, and we give up on what we really know, which is that we can't keep doing this over and over again.

Um years ago, uh, we heard uh from another economist that you know well that we have an opportunity in the healthcare market, but we're still not putting out nurses like we should, technicians, doctors get their education here and then leave and go someplace else.

How do we what can we as a city do to ensure that we're doing what we everything that we can to encourage diversification and then breed that from the bottom up?

Because I believe that that's where it begins that we can't have a top-down mentality about this.

Yeah.

Um, councilwoman, thank you for the question.

Uh I in terms of what you can do, I think as much keep doing exactly what you're doing, finding pathways for that partnership between the city in terms of developing pipelines where those folks can come in and finding partnerships with them.

I think that those changes are gonna have to be made at the state level if they are going to be effective, right?

We have to increase the Medicaid reimbursement rates, right?

That that you cannot be paid less to be a doctor in Southern Nevada or in Nevada as a whole than you are in other places, our ability to attract folks.

We have got to have more graduate medical education slots uh throughout the state of Nevada, local governments uh maybe can work on contributing and helping with some of those.

That's a state-related issue that's going to get done.

In addition to that, I think that there was legislation last legislative session.

I hope it continues to be part of the ongoing dialogue that would have created a public-private partnership for healthcare related activity, not unlike what we did with the Raiders, not unlike what we did with the A's, not unlike what we did with Tesla, not unlike what we did with the campus for hope.

Where if you come into the state of Nevada and you say, I'm willing to invest 100 million dollars, we'll find a way to match that investment or a lesser amount based on a competitive way of bringing those in.

This was a piece of legislation that was discussed, and I realize budget issues create problems, but I think we could create public-private partnerships around the things that we need most.

And maybe it's not as sexy as what we we see in terms of some of these big other projects that are being out there, but it will save people's lives because far too many people either cannot get in to see someone, which I think is incredibly problematic, or are leaving the state of Nevada to go get the health care that we need.

And to your point, I think the city of Las Vegas, again, you're you're bound by how many things you can do, and I'm really impressed by some of the initiatives that you've put on to try and create a pathway for new healthcare professionals to find their way in to the system.

I think it's brilliant, and I think it's the right thing to do.

We got to do more.

And I think the state is gonna have to be your partner in getting it done if we're gonna make a real change.

Okay.

Um Diaz.

Thank you, Madam Mayor, and thank you, Mr.

Aguero.

Um, I don't know how you can just spew all those facts and all that knowledge at that speed, but um I commend you for being able to um keep it lively and then also pepper us with uh significant data points.

Um my question is around the acreage that you highlighted is shrinking in terms of availability for us to even move the needle in a lot of these spaces.

Without land, we can't build more homes.

Without land, we can't look at what projects we can entice someone to come and then offer awesome employment opportunities to our residency and constituency because we're seeing how they're being left behind, and then with the mix of AI and how that may take some jobs uh away from our folks.

I'm real, I mean the the lights are blinking on the dashboard, right?

And so one, I wanted to know the three to five years if fully developed those acres.

Does that capture both residential and economic development opportunities for so I'm trying to figure out if we did X, then that would be the three to five years, or if we do them simultaneously.

So that's the first part of my question.

And then the other part of the question is I did it also popped up or jumped out at me when we do the comparison between Vegas and Clark County and the industrial part of our economic development.

Um we're kind of languishing in industrial and then counties taking off in industrial, but I think it speaks to again our position one geographically in southern Nevada and where we have landholdings and where now industrial may not fit in within the confines of our city.

But I kind of wanted you to speak to if you think that that's still a viable opportunity for us.

But I I kind of have heard through several answers that health care, health care, health care workforce development is probably the smartest avenue for us to pursue along with other other areas that we've been bolstering.

But I'm just gonna let you answer.

Sure.

Look, uh first of all, councilman, thank you for the councilwoman, excuse me.

Thank you for the question.

And and I agree with everything that you said.

Right.

If we're talking about that three to five years that are out there, the reality is that you're going to pivot toward infill uh type development, which has a bunch of benefits to it to start with.

But what where can you do that?

Where can we put some uses?

We know that within the city, and frankly, throughout southern Nevada, that there are a fair number of developments that used to be the intersection of Maine and Maine and just aren't anymore, and they are ripe for redevelopment and finding the ability to do that.

I think is where you're going to see a great deal more of that.

If you're asking me whether there's a sufficient amount of acreage to sort of change the trajectory of the city of Las Vegas, number one, I don't think there is.

I think that's where there is.

The other piece is I don't know that that's what you would want to do even if there was, right?

I think finding out and being very intentional about the leftover acreage is what's going to be critically important.

On the second part of the question, dealing with the land use mix, right?

It's it's it's always strikes me as kind of a funny thing, right?

We can sit in here and we talk about political borders between the county and Las Vegas or Henderson and the county.

Well, whatever if the Hitnesson in Las Vegas, right?

We get these sort of conversations.

People don't always sort of know what side of the border they're on.

They know that's an industrial park out there in North Las Vegas.

They know that this is the residential area where I live, those type of things, right?

I think that the jobs housing balance is critically important for us as an urban valley.

I don't know that I would necessarily change the things that you're doing, but I think what it would ultimately do is prompt a conversation about whether the distribution of the revenues that we are generating is fair and equitable.

Because in many ways, right, if you have one location that's providing the service and another location that's generating the taxes, this is the long history of Southern Nevada.

It's the reason we have the consolidated tax distribution formula today because uh the Las Vegas Strip is within Clark County, and so we add up all the money and we distribute it based on a formula.

As that build-out continues to change, if there is an equity there, right?

I think balancing that is in the best interest of everyone in Southern Nevada.

Maybe not a very popular answer as of some folks, but I think that that is sort of coming across the totality of the state of Nevada, some places outside of Southern Nevada in a much larger way.

Yes, ma'am.

Jeremy, on behalf of the entire city council, I'd like to thank you for your presentation and always your knowledge and expertise.

We appreciate it.

Thank you, Mayor.

Lovely to see you.

Very welcome.

Jeremy, thanks.

Incredible information too, just uh so much to absorb.

Um as part of today's presentation, members of the city managers executive team will be highlighting key accomplishments tied to the three strategic priorities.

Uh each will provide a brief overview of progress made in each of the priority areas.

First, we'll hear from deputy city manager Tim Hacker, who will walk us through recent accomplishments in the area of public safety, a top priority of our community.

Next, Deputy City Manager Saber Nubi will share updates on our health care priority.

Then we'll hear from Chief Financial Officer Susan Hedgeley, who will present on our work to diversify the economy.

And then finally, Deputy City Manager Rosa Cortez will provide an overview of the capital improvement projects currently in design and under construction that support all three priority areas.

With that, I'll turn it over to the city manager's executive team to begin their presentations.

And uh Tom, I I've been asked to um have a five-minute break.

So we're gonna break for five minutes before Tim starts to speak.

Sounds good.

Thank you.

Thank you, Mayor.

Okay, five minutes.

Cara will be back in a minute, or you can get started and show whatever you want to do.

Completely up to you.

Give her another moment.

I think I'm gonna get started.

Okay.

All right.

Uh Tim, why don't you start?

All right.

Thank you, Mayor.

City Council.

It's a pleasure to be here.

Tim Hacker, Deputy City Manager.

Uh, I'm gonna I'm gonna be speaking, or I'm tasked with getting through five years of accomplishments in public safety in the city of Las Vegas.

Since you've had these and you've read them, uh we don't want to spend a lot of time reading to you, but hopefully you can see that there are uh themes that pop out at you.

And a lot of it is dealing with creating an environment uh where people can feel safe and can enjoy our community.

We always in the city of Las Vegas not only look at our residents, but of course, our 22 plus million visitors a year.

And you'll see as we talk and touch upon some of the highlights and investments in public safety over these past five years.

A lot of it is really focused on that that tourism experience, those those uh those root uh commercial corridors.

Of course, uh there's a word that pops up here.

We have vulnerable citizens, uh our homeless uh uh citizens, and we talk a little bit and address a little bit about uh how do we mitigate, how do we work with, how do we uh work you know get them to the services that they need.

So out of those objectives, uh they really derive from goals.

And what you're gonna see, and I've already I like that the word partnership has come up in a lot of the conversations, is that we do partner.

We partner internally and we partner externally through our neighborhood revitalization, community and law enforcement partnerships and alternatives to incarceration, which were again, those were themes that city council talked about five years ago, and we put a lot of effort into budgets.

Everybody knows that uh policy is made through commitments of resources, and you have committed resources over the past five years.

And so we see the growth uh in in our commitment, uh, over 33 percent, almost 34 percent in public safety.

That's internal, and that of course includes Metro as well.

You've increased uh positions in that but in those budgets by over 10 percent for the city of Las Vegas departments, and then our funding for Metro, let's not let it be lost that it meets a natural uh measure of maintaining two officers per thousand.

So this is five years condensed into four buckets for four departments that I have the pleasure of supporting uh in DPS.

There you're gonna see uh in all of these departments, but in the DPS in particular, that the traditional efforts are are magnified, enhanced through technology.

So when we talk about cameras, we're talking about cameras in our public spaces to help uh uh keep an uh oversight over what is going, have have uh direct our resources to where they need to be, including even the flock system, which deals with uh license plate reading and things like that.

Again, new technology that uh helps expand our our our presence exponentially.

Uh there's a little a lot of outreach on there too, where you have a uh citizens police academy.

Well, from that we had interested citizens, so why not look at creating a chief's advisory board?

Uh canine.

So we had not had a canine unit for quite some time.

Uh there was an opportunity to uh have some grant funds expended, and so why not apply a uh utilize a canine unit in our our corridors?

You know, this this particular ones, a gun detection and whatnot.

So that's really helped us again use technology to exponentially expand our reach.

Las Vegas Fire is not far behind that, seeking safer grants, fire station replacements, addition of a new fire station up in Sky Canyon, a recent growth area.

We've developed master planning that can look at what is the growth coming in.

So there again, planning, community development is working with fire so that they can find areas to locate fire stations.

Those development agreements help us get the land and secure the land and maybe even secure funding for it.

And then our bomb squad, only one in southern Nevada, but guess what?

They've they've reached out throughout the state and have created a department in a in a in a in an association that helps us with that.

Office of emergency management, someone mentioned COVID.

Yes, that's what they focused on for almost uh over half of that five years.

In addition to that, continuing to support the big large uh regional uh you know game, you know, the the Super Bowl, the annual New Year's Eve party, they're involved in helping fund or our plan for that and be part of the instant command systems on that.

And the municipal court, we mentioned let's find alternatives to incarceration.

Our municipal court has been a leader on that.

We added another special court fresh start program, I believe believe.

If you if you count some of our traffic specialty courts, that we're now up to about seven specialty courts.

That's incredible.

And so working with the community develop resources for uh those uh clients that come and need help, even in being properly attired to to be present in court and be uh uh have their cases addressed.

Well, we have to get down to numbers, and so our Las Vegas fire and rescue numbers.

Uh it's apparent that they've been busy, and so growth of almost 13 percent in call numbers, that's for the region.

Remember, we we dispatch for three jurisdictions ourselves, North Las Vegas, and Clark County.

We've seen an increase in total incidents, that's for the city of Las Vegas, and then uh of over two and a half percent, and then 43% increase in total transports.

Why is that number so big?

Remember, we implemented with your support the contract ambulance service, and so we we are basically responsible for doing the service and billing for it.

The second table talks about our prevention team.

You uh they are the people behind the scenes that are reviewing the plans and helping development, so 88% growth in fire plan review, 59% growth in total development related fire prevention activities, 53% in customer service response and fire safety complaints.

Additionally, uh behind the scenes working with community development and and nuisance abatement and others, the community risk reduction efforts, over almost 47,000 safety violations have been corrected in this five-year time frame to keep our community safe.

Uh non-traditional, these are the partners that you might not think about, but public safety really is kind of everyone's everyone's business.

And so we see here in the first table that there's a number of incidents where we're basically working to get out and become more ingrained in our community to make them develop trust and maintain that trust.

And so the number of events that our public safety folks are there, including municipal court, uh, is increased dramatically over this five-year time frame.

Uh, the more teams, that's where we're really getting out and bringing bringing service providers to the folks that need that service, our vulnerable populations, our homeless population.

Just look at the extra the increased growth.

A lot of that is because the council approved additional more teams through the budget.

So you go from a mere 318 to over 20,000 contacts.

That's the not that's not a number of encampments, that's the number of people that are receiving outreach in contacts.

Our Metro, they have the hot team, and so that uh again, you can see the dramatic increase in how many folks they are touching.

Municipal court, this is also a nod to our criminal side of our city attorney's office, and you look at the criminal filings, and you see, well, Tim, that's actually dropping off a little bit.

That's not without uh effort of our law enforcement to bring valid cases to them.

There's a lot of efforts in Carson City that's been mentioned where there's been decriminalization and a lot of traffic and misdemeanor types of crimes uh have been decriminalized and are civil at this point in time.

Dispatch, you can't forget them.

I talked about their growth, but dispatch events for the uh metro, you can see a slight increase in that four-year time frame that's shown, however, calls received uh as far as dispatch events increase, calls received is is a little bit down, but it's consistent.

I think it's consistent, it's fair to say that's been able to maintain that two officers per thousand has definitely uh allowed that to happen.

Additionally, uh IT is a continued great source of support, and you can see you know, you you you don't have cameras throughout the community without AT.

You don't address uh modem and connectivity issues in our fire apparatus and getting that information uploaded so that patients get the best service they can.

You see code enforcement and the growth of core enforcement cases throughout the years.

Again, multi-departments within the city working together, public works hauling away debris from encampments in these other areas, communications getting the word out about what's going on in the community and encouraging uh people to take public safety seriously, and then our our economic development department.

You just uh as a counsel improved the secure approved, increasing the availability of security and safety grant programs, business protection programs.

That's not lost on the impact in our in our tourists and our commercial corridors.

I believe with that, if there's uh questions, I turn it over to Saber Newby Speed.

Okay, no questions.

I guess no.

Okay.

Welcome.

Thank you.

Good morning, Mayor and Council members.

Health is one of the newest strategic uh priorities of the city of Las Vegas.

Over the past five years, we've not only responded to an unprecedented global pandemic, but we've also proactively expanded our infrastructure policies and services to build a healthier, more resilient community, particularly those uh for those most vulnerable among us.

I'm Sabra Newby, deputy city manager for the city of Las Vegas.

I'm proud to walk you through a comprehensive look at our city's health related accomplishments from fiscal year 2020 to 2025.

This presentation highlights policies, programs, and projects that span mental health, homelessness, public safety, pandemic response, uh, employee wellness, and regional coordination.

So let's begin with a look at FY 2020, a year that tested our systems, but also catalyzed new approaches to care and coordination.

So in FY2020, you'll see that we uh I've separated it out with new policies, programs, and projects.

I'm not going to go through every single one in the interest of time.

I am timing myself right now.

Um, but in new policies, there were, of course, because of COVID, virtual court operations and the transition that municipal court had to do that to those virtual operations to keep everyone safe.

We also received about 4.9 million dollars in HUD CARES Act funding to uh address homelessness, food insecurity, and special needs services.

In the program section, of course, we had two new programs addressing business needs the business protection program and the business preparedness grant program.

Uh the protection program provided 61,000 in RDA funding to 61 businesses to help them with their storefront security and business preparedness helped all of those businesses open up again with $4,000 grants to small businesses for PPE and retrofits and training into the uh new projects.

Of course, we can't forget Camp Cashman.

That was a temporary shelter that was opened up by the city when uh there was a COVID outbreak at Catholic charities, and then of course the ISOQ facility that we opened up that uh diverted 200 or rather 2,220 bed nights from hospitals and treated 245 patients.

Moving along to fiscal year 2021, um, when COVID really hit hits hit its stride, um we uh had new policies including changing our DPS um inmate to intake, and that was so successful that the transmission rates were actually kept under one percent.

On to new programs, uh, who could forget the vaccination pods?

Um those pods were for employees for law enforcement and expanded to six uh ward-based community clinics prioritizing underserved neighborhoods.

Also, Las Vegas Fire and Rescue created a program for care facility coordination that was with 22 nursing rehab facilities that improved communication reduced uh 911 overuse.

We also had a number of training um programs through HR for our employees, and that also was the year that we expanded and uh introduced the aero transit, the aero transit buses, of course, um helped take our uh homeless individuals to um places that they need to go.

In terms of new projects that year, we had the recuperative care center rounded out its first year, um, serving over 300 patients, and one of the more interesting and science-based items, uh, public works conducted um local and national studies detecting uh the COVID virus in our wastewater as well as PFAS.

On to 2022, of course, new policies.

One of those included the correctional health accreditation.

Our detention center was reaccredited under NCCHC standards, which is in compliance with national jail health standards in terms of new program.

We restored the community paramedic program.

We also instituted through Las Vegas Fire and Rescue the Contract Ambulance Service or CAS.

In terms of new projects, we instituted the UV sanitation or sanitization.

I knew I was going to get that wrong at City Hall.

On to 2023, in terms of new policies, we have opioid settlement fund strategy that we were beginning to implement that year.

We also launched the SHIFT program, which helps homeowners with both code enforcement and health safety violations.

And in terms of new projects, Las Vegas Fire and Rescue and Neighborhood Services had a new agreement to cooperatively align downtown corridor health and human services.

Into 2024, we have the neighborhood services department successfully applied for and received Medicaid provider status.

So we have a type 20 Medicaid provider status that allows for reimbursement, both for Las Vegas Fire and Rescue and hopefully in the future for the RCC and courtyard services.

In terms of the new programs, we have also CAS and the CRT, which I will talk a little bit more about later.

And we launched the MOMI Mentors program, which is which pairs pregnant women with community mentors and health screenings.

We had a number of employee wellness sessions and public safety wellness sessions that we expanded to there as well.

In terms of new projects, we transitioned the courtyard to a new service provider, Nevada Behavioral Health, which has expanded mental health services available for our guests there.

And we also opened our health and wellness center over on Maine in next to the courtyard.

In 2025, moving along, our government affairs team were able to get the SB 54 passed and signed by the governor.

This will allow us to hopefully in the future bill Medicaid for services at the RCC.

In terms of new programs, we launched the EMT scholarship program in combination with the mayor's fund to support increased EMT training.

And the opioid recovery funding, of course, that we started to develop the policy around directed 1.2 million to housing services and specialty courts.

In terms of new projects, you have EUD launching their biohealth innovation challenge.

And we have also agreements just recently with the Nevada State University on for sublase space in the women's cancer center in the medical district.

Over the past several years, the city of Las Vegas has made significant strides in building a compassionate coordinated response to mental health needs, especially for individuals in crisis first responders and our unhoused neighbors.

These are just some of those efforts that we have undertaken, and I'd like to go through just a couple of them.

The CRT ambulance that I mentioned earlier is a public-private partnership, and that's a specialty ambulance that is staffed with both EMS and a licensed clinical social worker, and they respond to mental and behavioral health crises.

Originally established an FY21, we now have four CRT units, and last year we handled almost 6,000 calls.

Also, we integrated a licensed clinical social worker into the call center.

That's important because it allows that communications center to have a licensed clinical social worker address some of those calls where it may it might not be a medical issue, but it's a mental health issue.

We also have a ARPA funded mental health facility coming with the new RCC.

That's a 10 million dollar addition with state ARPA funds.

The Crisis Stabilization Center, although it isn't ours, it's Clark County's, but we are able to use it.

That opened also during this time.

It's 35 shares available 24-7 for people in psychiatric crisis.

The Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department opened up their wellness bureau for personnel families, retirees to provide confidential mental health supports.

And of course, the specialty court also opened up during this time their mental health court providing those services.

And finally, how could we forget the campus for hope was launched, the foundation was launched, and their state match was received.

And we look forward to that being established and providing additional mental health services for our unhoused population.

And that rounds it out for me.

I'd like to welcome no Susan Health Sleeve.

A SADRA, I think that uh some of the council members have some questions.

Okay.

Olivia.

Well, I just want to um because we know our lingo and we've been working on a lot of the initiatives over these years, but I don't know how many in the audience who are here with us today really know what the recuperative care center's function is and how it is one of a kind in our southern Nevada area.

So I just wanted you to elaborate just because just saying recuperative care center doesn't really expand on what the work that unfolds in there and how we're trying to expand the mission.

So I just wanted you to give the highlights of what it all entails.

Sure, sure.

So uh for the audience, the recuperative care center is a one-of-a-kind uh facility that we have in southern Nevada, and it's run um through uh FQHC that we contract with, and essentially what it is is um so for you and me uh you know, when we uh experience some sort of health issue and we're hospitalized, um, oftentimes we're discharged from the hospital and we go back to our home and we watch Netflix and people bring us chicken soup.

Um, but for our unhoused population, they have no place uh to go, and so oftentimes uh it leads to uh just a circular uh process where they go back to the streets, they get worse, they get re-hospitalized, um, sometimes with even worse outcomes than they started with.

Um so the recuperative care center is a place um it was about 40 uh beds uh currently because it's relocated because we're building a new one, um, it's about 20 beds, but it allows folks to go there and get better.

It's staffed with nurses, it has a medical director, and so they can really take the time off of the streets to heal and get back on their feet before they're discharged.

And actually, it also allows us while they're there and staying at the RCC to be able to uh work with them on housing.

So we actually have a pretty high rate of being able to house those individuals after they are discharged from the RCC.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

I I think that uh I think that was the one question.

Okay.

Thank you so much.

Good morning, Mayor and Council.

Uh Susan Helpsley, Chief Financial Officer for the Record.

I get the privilege of talking about priority three, diversifying our economy.

And the first question is why is economic diversification so important?

Well, if you look at our revenue picture, almost 75% of our revenue comes from consolidated tax and property tax.

And we are an economically volatile area as Jeremy Aguero is alluding to, we are very tourism dependent.

So most of our CTEX is sales tax.

And so the one thing about economic diversification, the city can't significant, we can't signal single-handedly diversify the economy, but what we do do is we support it by encouraging infrastructure investments and by making it easier to do business here.

So, how do we bolster our consolidated tax revenue?

Well, one of the things that we can do is not only do we need different types of businesses, but we need more businesses.

So since 2020, our businesses, our business licenses have increased 3.7% from about 33,872 to 35,136.

Um, we've also streamlined alcohol on premises licenses back in April of 2022.

We reduced those categories from 26 to 11.

We reduced the origination fee from 75,000 to 5,000.

And by doing this, we have really seen a lot of growth in our craft beer industry in the arts district.

How many of you guys have uh visited the arts district and partaken in some of those wonderful breweries?

And so we've seen a 10% growth in licenses from April 22 to June 30th, 2025.

We also are supporting our current businesses.

That was one of the things that we really need to make sure we focus on, not only bringing new businesses to the community, but supporting those businesses that are already here.

So one of the things that we did with some of our ARPA money is we started a mobile food vendor safety grant program.

Those are for our food truck vendors.

A lot of our food trucks were not licensed by the health department.

They didn't, they weren't up to SNUF with fire.

So we had grants that actually enable those folks to get up to SNUF with the health department.

They were fire inspected.

We had 70 businesses that participated from November 22 to January of 2025, and 48 of those businesses are still actively licensed.

So we consider that a very successful program.

Another thing that we can do is how do we bolster our property tax revenue?

As Jeremy was saying in in our earlier slides, the majority of our tax space is residential properties.

75% is residential, 25% is commercial.

That comes from the uh the county, that's their numbers.

And so one of the things that we're doing is we're looking for land conversion opportunities.

We have a lot of zero property tax parcels.

Those are parcels that we don't get tax revenue from.

They're either underutilized public facilities, public facilities if they're owned by the government, they don't pay property tax, or under underutilized open space.

So if you have a vacant lot, your property tax is very, very low, or vacant BLM land.

So one of the things that we're focusing on developing is focusing on developing those particular parcels to generate property tax, additional sales tax, business license fees, and everything that comes along with it.

So we've had several recent successes.

Nevada hand.

They finalized a DDA for an 11-acre BML parcel at Westcliff.

That will become 240 units of multifamily housing.

The ovation heirloom at Rome Decatur, that just opened.

That is a 78 million dollar senior affordable housing project.

Badlands, we that closed golf club course will eventually become almost 1,500 homes with an overall impact of 1.25 billion dollars to the economy.

Cashman and Grant Soyer Redevelopment, that's a former government public facility, which could become 1,500 workforce housing units with an overall impact of $650 million.

The Desert Pines Golf Course, that is a public facility golf course that will become $1,500 affordable and market rate homes with an overall impact of over $600 million.

And then Sky Summit, that's formal BL BLM land that will become $3,500 homes with an overall impact of $3 billion.

So how else are we supporting economic diversification?

Well, we utilize RDA tools to advance redevelopment.

You'll see on the slide that our revenue, the property tax that's generated from the RDA continues to grow.

18% of that is given is used for fund to fund education and affordable housing projects.

The remainder is used for strategic land purchases, developer incentives, visual and safety improvements, and other program costs.

One of the tools that the RDA uses is called a tourism improvement district, otherwise known as a TID.

That is sales tax that's generated by a business that can then be redirected back to the business.

And one of the most known TIDs here in the city is Area 15.

How many of you guys have been to Area 15?

It's a pretty cool place.

So they have two TIDs.

The first one, it will it will pay back about 14% of their initial investment over a 20-year period.

And the new one that just opened up where they're putting in the universal House of Horrors and all that stuff, that's their second TID.

That will generate about 13% of the construction cost.

Those are billion dollar projects that may not have come to the city without this particular tool.

Another tool that we use is called tax increment financing or a TIFF, and that's property tax that is paid back to the developer.

So another good example that's just right across the street from us over here at the World Trade Center, the Expo Convention Center, they use a TIFF.

We re-rebate their property taxes, and they pay money on their loan that they took out.

They took out a 30 million dollar bond to build that that pays for their both their principal and interest on that bond.

We also have opportunity zones, and those were created under the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017.

And those are economically distressed communities that provide tax incentives to encourage investment and spur economic growth.

Southern Lands District, they're in the Arts District, they are building a 337 unit multifamily project with retail and restaurant space.

Also in the arts district, the miles is going in.

That's a 311 unit multifamily project with restaurant space.

And then over here in Symphony Park, Southern Land is building a high-rise and a mid-rise with over 500 units.

We also have new market tax credits.

Investors provide capital to community development entities.

Those investors receive a 39% tax credit spread over seven years.

And if you guys ever want to get into this, it's really boring.

But it's it's uh it's a lot of information on new market tax credits, but I'll just tell you we've closed 12 deals.

Our most recent have been with the Westside Library, the Strong Start Academy in the courtyard.

So there's a lot of opportunity with those.

Other opportunities that we're looking at, we're providing more workforce training opportunities.

One of the things that we've heard about when businesses want to come to Southern Nevada is we don't have a trained workforce.

So we are partnering with the College of Southern Nevada to provide education and training centers on city land.

So the Westside Education and Training Center just opened at the historic West Side School.

The East Side Education and Training Center, that will be part of the new Desert Pines development that's going in.

It was just awarded a $5 million grant from the U.S.

Economic Development Administration, and the Medical District Education and Training Center has recently applied for an EDA grant.

So we have three of those.

One of them is already open, and two of them are on the way.

Another thing is we're facilitating expanding broadband and high speed internet providers.

It's another thing we hear about when we talk to some of these businesses that want to come that they're more high tech.

We don't have great internet here.

So Google Fiber, teleport communications, and gigapower, they're making hundreds of millions of dollars in investment here in Las Vegas to bring better internet.

It will benefit our residents, our remote workers, and any any businesses that want to come.

We're also encouraging growth in biotechnology.

The bio and the biohealth innovation challenge is a 10 million dollar competition that seeks innovative proposals to develop and operate a biosciences incubator lab.

And a winner will be announced in the fall of 2026.

So how we benefited from the Valley's economic diversification?

Because remember, it's not just the city of Las Vegas, it's all of us.

So we've got all kinds of things going on in the medical district.

The Kirk Kerkorian School of Medicine retriculated its first class in July 2017.

Its medical building opened in 22.

We've got all kinds of things happening.

Recently opened in the medical district, the Lumina Las Vegas Memory Care Center, the Women's Cancer Center.

There's hardly any office space available right now.

So on the on the horizon, we've got a DDA for Goldstein Medical Office Building.

There's an ENA with parting C's, Nevada Health and Biosciences Corporation is starting construction on a new public health land.

All kinds of stuff is happening in the medical district.

And as you guys probably know, Southern Nevada is becoming a bit of a sports industry make uh mecca.

While our sports teams do not necessarily diversify our economy that the to the extent that manufacturing will, it does provide us a more stable base for the tourism industry because it gives more people more reasons to visit.

So since 2017, we've become the home of the night, the Golden Knights, the Aces, the Aviators, the Raiders, the Silver Knights, the Desert Dogs, and Nighthawks, the Thrill, the Fabulous Sin City Rollers, and Cummingson of the Athletics.

We also continue to be a huge draw for adult and youth sporting events.

We've got the players showcase challenge showcase, the mayor's cup, and the Vegas Cups, all huge soccer teams or soccer tournaments here.

And we have upcoming opportunities to further expand the sports industry with our regional pickleball complex, our regional aquatic complex, and an RFP is will be going out for a youth adult hockey facility.

So with that, I will turn it over to Rosa Cortez, who will talk to us about our capital improvement project.

Good morning, Mayor and Council.

Rosa Cortez, Deputy City Manager, here to close out this session and give you an overview of our capital improvement projects that we currently have in design and construction.

We currently have 94 projects at a value of 1.3 billion dollars.

This is just a depiction of how the projects are distributed across the city of Las Vegas.

71 of the 94 are in design, and 23 are currently in construction.

And these are the three current strategic priorities we have, and we place the projects in one of these categories.

For public safety, we have the traditional fire safety and public safety.

We also have the non-traditional for our flood control projects, our pedestrian and street safety projects.

For health care, we have our health and wellness centers, our recuperative care center, and park and trail improvements that provide heart health.

And then for economic diversification, we have projects that support that, and that are our complete street projects, our workforce development projects, parking garages, and bridges and overpasses.

And when we put those in those categories of the 9450, our public safety at a value of 740 million, 21, our health care at 220 million, and economic diversification come in at 23 projects at 370 million.

And here is a graphical depiction of that.

As you can see, public safety takes the win at 56%.

Now I will go and highlight just a few projects of the 94.

Currently, we have Craig and Park Field Modification Project under construction.

This project is located near Valley View and Fulton.

It is near Fire Station number five and Hyde Park Middle School.

This project includes two new soccer artificial fields, a baseball field, a new playground and shade structure.

In addition to programming soccer here at the park, we also allow Hyde Park Middle School to have their PE classes.

This project will be complete in the next 30 days and will be ready to be utilized.

The next project here is the regional aquatic center pavilion pool.

This project is also under construction.

It is located in Summerlin near Paulo Verde High School.

This project brings you an Olympic size pool and a building that will provide not only local and state swim meets but also national and international.

They're a well-renowned team that prepared for the Olympics, and we did get some winners out of that Olympics team.

So congrats to them.

This is a much needed parking garage in the heart of ATB Arts District.

This brings uh 500 parking spaces, including spaces for electric vehicles, and it also has space for retail for new business opportunities as well as some public art installation.

We look forward to seeing this project complete by summer of 2026.

The next project is the pickleball complex at Wayne Bunker Park.

This is a new state of the art facility.

It will be starting construction later in the year.

It is 24 courts, which include two championship courts.

It is located at Buffalo and Alexander.

And studies show that Pickleball provides health and physical benefits to our community, and this facility will also support new sports tourism to our community.

Next one is the recuperative care center that you heard about from Sabra.

And this project is under construction.

It is located at Main Street near Formaster, and we should have this one complete by next summer as well of 2026.

And then we have the Sky Canyon Providence Area, Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, Substation and Park.

This one is located on the southwest corner of Grand Teton and Wallapie.

This project will have a groundbreaking ceremony next week or a couple weeks, and we hope to have the station open by the end of 2026.

It will be a new substation for the Northwest to help reduce response times for emergency calls, and then we'll also have a two-acre city park.

The next one is the Fire Station 103 placement.

This new fire station will be located at Alta and Falcon.

It will replace the station that is currently located at Johnson Upland.

It's a new Ford Bay Fire Station, and we should expect to start construction next year.

We have the Summerlin Trail Project.

This is a trail that starts at Rampart and goes to the 215.

It connects the existing Bonanza Trail with the 215 trail.

It is 3.5 miles of trail, 12-foot path, multi-use, and it is in construction, and we expect to be complete by fourth quarter of 2026.

Then we have the Fire Station Center Rehabilitation where we have the existing fire training center on Mojave, which is located between Bonanza and Harris.

We will be upgrading the training elements on the training grounds behind the building.

And this should start construction first quarter of 2026.

We have the Health and Wellness Center at Bonanza and Lamb currently in design.

It's a new 15,000 square foot building located on the south side of Bonanza, just east of Lamb, and it will provide healthcare services to a community that areas where health care is not available for some of our members.

The next facility is the Red Rock Communications Center.

This is a joint project with the City of North Las Vegas, Clark County, Metro, and Las Vegas to build the 911 joint community center on the southeast corner of Deer Springs and Shombra Road.

This project is currently in design.

And lastly, the well, almost lastly, West Las Vegas Library Remodel.

We are remodeling the old Las Vegas Library, the new library located on MLK will be open soon, and we are looking at making this space a new arts center with a new black box theater, which will be the first in our city's inventory, new dance rooms, music rooms, multi-purpose room, and office space.

And then finally, we have the Northwest Regional Park.

This is a 160-acre parcel where 40 acres is designated for the school district for a new high school.

The other 120 is to provide vital green space for our community with new soccer fields, baseball fields, softball fields, and a dog park and some park amenities.

And we are currently working on phase one of this project and hope to continue to make this project become fruition for us.

And with that, I will turn it over to Dr.

Riley.

Is anybody any question?

No.

Mayor, I think we're good on time, but uh to sort of wrap up by noon.

Is that still I think we're good.

Excellent.

Let me see if that next slide coming up.

There we go.

So why do we do strategic planning?

I can tell you in every role that I've served, this is one of the most important functions of the elected board.

There's no way you can do your job without it.

Um there are several reasons why we do strategic planning and set such strategic priorities.

One is optimization, it gives the organization its best chance at a successful future.

It's the old adage if you don't know where you're going, you're not gonna get there.

Second, and most importantly, it's justification, and it provides a rational basis for resource allocation.

And this becomes extremely important when there's all these priorities and all these important issues that surface.

How do you manage that?

How does the board come up with where are the prioritors and where do we allocate precious resources?

Priorities make a difference.

And alignment.

It helps staff leadership and elected officials move in the same direction.

Right?

It gets everybody on board.

The latest employee survey you had, you had a large percent, 80% of your your workforce said, Hey, I identify with one of these areas.

My work's important.

This is where the board set the priority, and I feel I am contributing to that.

So this is why we do strategic reporting.

It's probably one of the most important functions that you do as a city council.

Just a couple ground rules uh and just for for guidance.

One is that as we discussed, it's a citywide focus, right?

Not that we ignore wards, but it is a citywide focus when we put what our strategic priorities are.

Um, don't be concerned with wordsmithing, we'll do that.

Put your ideas out there.

Just whatever those ideas, we'll capture them.

We'll work smith and we'll come back by the end of the day.

Um, we have a parking lot.

Basically, if stuff come up, if internal issues come up, if stuff that are important, put them out there.

We'll capture them on a parking lot and we'll come back to them.

Viewer is better.

You came up with three five years ago.

I would just caution anything over five, it's probably too many, and it's really gonna be hard to operationalize.

So I think that we'll start big.

We want to have be very inclusive.

In fact, before we go to lunch, I'm gonna ask each of you to do 10 major strategic priorities.

We'll whittle them down in the afternoon.

Um, and here's kind of the issue in the balance.

Be careful not to identify a priority area that you have no control over.

You don't want to deal with graduation rates in K through 12 or in higher education.

You don't want to be responsible for child welfare.

Here's the balance.

It's your ability to convene.

It's to bring people together around important issues, give accurate information for people to make informed decisions.

Now, I'm agnostic about your your past priorities as a facilitator and going forward.

But I will use health care as an example of a convener.

In fact, I use this in class as an example of the power to convene.

You don't have all the resources to deal with health care outcomes in this community.

But your power is to bring people together.

It's what we talk about managing people and managing resources that don't belong to us.

That's the skill set we need of employees.

Because we need others to accomplish what's important our city.

So the balance is don't take on something at the end of the day you're going to be blamed for.

At the same time, don't ignore your powerful role as a convener to bring people together.

And I used a healthcare as an example that you identified five years ago and your power to convene people around important issue.

Okay.

Any questions, comments, or I know if I'm off track, I know the mayor and others, you'll you'll make sure I stay on track, so I'm not worried about that.

But I wanted to actually just one thing, and it's just more of just a quick round table, and then we'll kind of jump into kind of some of the important issues about thinking big about the strategic priorities.

So based upon the the wealth of information that Jeremy presented in your own staff, if we could just kind of just and we'll capture this on both constraints and opportunities.

What opportunities and constraints are going to shape your next priorities?

And just kind of just brainstorm big on this too, and we'll just kind of just do round uh round robin uh discussion is but what are kind of those big constraints and opportunities as you look at the next three to five years that's going to impact your ability to set priorities, and anybody can run with it.

Um councilwoman Kelly.

Thank you, Mayor.

Uh available land is a constraint, obviously.

Lack lack thereof.

Yep.

Jeremy pointed that out very well.

Others?

A constraint that I see is um how do we say um ever shrinking um yes, uh like the economy is not doing well, so we know that, therefore, funds are receding instead of increasing.

So I'm trying a shrinking or uh stagnant economy, I guess would be the concerns about either stagnant or actually uh a reduction, right?

Yes, financial.

So the economic uh uh outlook um is questionable, right?

I mean, the indicators that Jeremy put out there um are concerning, uh, not only for Las Vegas but elsewhere, but they're but they're concerning.

And then an opportunity, I think, for us to explore is um it is going and moving at lightning speed, so technology and how do we use it to maximize our efficiency?

It's okay, challenging me and keep up with AI and technology these days.

It's just it's just mayor pro 10.

I I I'm gonna highlight kind of what I think is most important for me in the process is the philosophical philosophy that Jeremy kind of pointed to.

A constraint is I think in the past there's been this thought that we're on an island that we work with in just the city boundaries that we can't influence.

I think that's a constraint, it's just the thought process.

The opportunity on the other hand is we can convene and we can partner, and if we put ourselves in that mindset, I think we have a lot more ability to influence anything uh that we decide to focus in on.

That constraint, council uh councilman pro 10.

Uh, can we put uh limited jurisdiction?

Would that describe your constraint?

Or would you describe that in other words?

I want to I I would say I I think for me it's think thinking about the thought process is our our ability to think beyond just the confines of the city as an organization.

We have the ability to bring people on.

The constraint is our our understanding of that.

And um, councilman, I I'd also say that is also an opportunity.

I is that your ability to convene and use that powerful role.

I mean, who else can do that?

To bring all the players together.

Private sector can't do that.

Government can do that, right?

We don't always have to lead, right?

We can we can bring people together and decide how to how to move forward on important issues.

So both both a constraint and and an opportunity there.

I agree.

Nancy.

I have two constraints.

One would be water or natural resources, and the other one would be uh sort of in the face of increasing demands, we have a limited tax base.

So both water and national resources, um the tax base, right?

Just uh uh uh ability what either through home rule or just ability to go out there and and and raise new revenue around issues and the tolerance of the public in order to uh uh to be taxed.

Do you have any opportunities that you wanted to mention?

I'll come back to that.

Oh, okay.

Francis, can you use the mic?

Yes, for the record?

Yeah, okay.

Uh constraint not listed yet is financial constraints, budgetary constraints.

So many priorities, right?

And this is why these strategic priorities are so important.

It's it provides that rational uh uh uh basis for resource allocation.

That that's the tough decisions, right?

Gives your city manager and their staff to decide how we're gonna allocate these these limited resources based upon the priorities you set.

And I don't know if that will ever truly embrace them as much as we should or can, but the opportunities work to work with other levels of government because coming together time and time again, when you look at success success stories across the country, it's usually most impactful when state and local government works together on the same opportunity.

Huge issue, it's how your employees, what employees are bringing on, the skill set they need are these skills soft skills to be able to persuade to negotiate to bring people together.

We can teach them hard skills, it's these soft skills that are so important.

How do we bring those resources of people who don't belong to us, but we need them at the table, right?

That's it.

Okay.

Councilwoman, Miss Summers Armstrong.

Thank you.

Um, I'd like to put an opportunity um to uh to counter the available land.

I think that we have more opportunities than we know to uh partner to use underutilized land um as as opportunities for us to have housing.

Um and I think in the community that I serve, there are opportunities to partner with faith-based organizations and nonprofits uh to be able to do the best that we can address the housing uh crisis, but I think it goes back to another limitation, which is dollars and cents, and people being prepared um and knowing how to um work with government um to make that work and and and to get into this space of developing it.

It's sort of a a closed um chest.

There's only a few people who you know know how to do it, and oftentimes they're for profit, right?

And so how do we work with folks who have a different perspective and can meet the needs of a different population?

Um if you look at even Symphony Park, the most of the housing that is being developed here is for those baby boomers, high-income folks.

Um, that's not where the crisis is.

And you know, what we can also learn from other cities that have been landlocked, right?

Is that how do you grow smartly, how do you grow up, how do you look at those resources, right?

And the past we just talked about just unlimited growth in southern Nevada.

That it's we we have to think differently, right?

But it's not like other communities haven't faces that we can learn from.

Um you know, I think an opportunity is our attitude as a you know lived here and been involved for so many years, and and we're what you know, I like to say when you get here in the morning, if you just got here, we're happy to see you.

We have a can-do attitude.

It's it's what's transformed our tourism industry, it's uh why all the positive things about us.

I know we have a lot of challenges, but we have a can-do attitude, and I think any time we can harness that and then be convene or get people believing the fact that we can as Herb Kelleher used to say, and he started Southwest Airlines, you know, he he hires attitude because you can train everything else, and and I think that's one of our biggest strengths and opportunities.

Right.

Exactly.

Nice others.

So I I have two opportunities.

One is we have both state and local investment slash financing tools.

So we've got the RDA, we've got the different um increment or with TIFFS and SIDS, and then at the state level, Governor Lombardo has directed a lot of money to housing, so I think we have those opportunities.

And then my second opportunity is currently we don't have um very large philanthropic base, but I see that's an opportunity to really bring in the philanthropic dollars to support our priorities.

Councilwoman, I think you bring up a really good point.

The tools, right?

Is that how do you take advantage of existing tools out there to accomplish your goals too?

And sometimes we don't focus on those a lot, so that's that's really uh spot on.

And and and turning to the philanthropic base and the faith-based communities too to help as part of this community to to realize these important priorities.

Any other opportunities?

I I was just gonna add, like I think the fact I I think we're the only jurisdiction in Southern Nevada that I know of that does this, so I would say our staff are an opportunity.

We have an exceptional team at the city of Las Vegas, we have a great executive team, um, and they're the ones that put us ahead of everybody else.

And I I myself am very competitive.

I think this council is competitive, they're our competitive competitive advantage.

And I'm not just saying this because I'm here, but uh I think I've told you this all personally when I went when I met with you too.

I've been impressed, you know, just about the can do attitude too, and just uh uh, you know, even the preparation of this or the the type of information they provided to council to make these informed decisions was impressive.

Uh and and it doesn't always exist, let me tell you that yes, Cara.

I think the other side of financial and budgetary constraints is I I want to be really careful how I say this, Susan, but the I'm gonna use the word creativity, but we don't like to use creativity when we talk about budgets and finances because that's what gets you in trouble.

But what but what I'm hearing here is is the C tax and how how there's been a challenge, the structure of our taxes, which I know from a bigger perspective, because that's been the same, you know, after the 1980s um uh property tax shift.

But I think I think thinking about things differently, really trying to focus on being have a more innovative thinking about revenue and the structure of revenue could be a great opportunity.

Good point, and and how you operationalize these are going to be important.

So you know, you're gonna talk big priorities today.

Your staff's gonna actually come back, you know, they're meeting with department heads on on October 23rd, 28th, and come back to you with how you're gonna operationalize that, and that's what you need to pay attention to to your points is that that that you know the priority is one thing, but how you operationalize accomplishments really important.

Um, I'm so sorry, go ahead.

I'm sorry.

Um so an opportunity that I believe that we have um just to in uh tie into evolving technology is workforce training.

I think that that is really important.

Um we see it with WedSE and what's gonna happen with East Etsy and how do you say what's the acronym?

Metzi.

Okay.

Um I think that those are really amazing opportunities that we have to fill in the gaps that are going to fuel diversification of our economy.

And uh I'm proud to say that the city of Las Vegas is at the forefront of that.

Um if we know that we have these gaps in service and employment, and we see that we have these gaps in uh in income, but we're preparing from a community base, which is much different than a 10,000 foot, but it's very personalized.

Um we now prepare our community to grow financially, educationally, um, and I think that that's an amazing opportunity for us to fill in the positions that are open in these expanding um careers, and I'm really excited about it.

And uh councilman uh Knutson, I'm trying to put as many people to work from board five over in your neighborhood as I possibly can.

I I think it's it's a wonderful opportunity, and that's forward thinking from staff and collaborating with others to get it done.

And that's a good example.

You're not owning education but you are you you you are at you're adding value to that right to to you know to existing stuff out there in order to train the workforce to make things happen.

Yeah.

Any other um constraints or opportunities and we can come back to this but does that capture the majority of them?

Okay so before for lunch what I was hoping to do um because we'll use our lunch to kind of pull all this together um is that you have those stickums in front of you if you can go up to ten priorities.

Think big at this point.

We'll we'll narrow you we'll narrow it down and don't worry about being duplicative right at this point.

So what if you do is that for each one is right and use your Sharpie if you could because we want to put those up there and cluster them together.

If you could just spend like uh ten minutes uh going up there and just lifting where you think the priorities are then we're gonna do is we're gonna do a readout staff is going to collect them and then over lunch we're gonna cluster them together right and try to wordsmith a priority for you.

So at this point don't worry ignore what I said about the three to five think big up to ten because we'll get down that after lunch if that's okay like housing or it can be as as broad as health care it can be broad as public safety but even if you're narrow we're gonna clu we're gonna clump those together too so at this point you know think big uh so we want to make sure we capture everything and we'll be able to put those in buckets afterwards if it's more narrow or more specific so if you could use your uh Sharpie uh and just one per uh stick them and then what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna have you read them out.

Stick them okay and you know just kind of put them right on the table and then after you read them out staff is going to collect them and we'll do our work over lunch.

So take about ten minutes right I don't think I have 10 more we have a plan at lunch that you know our plan of lunch at lunch and I'm gonna go to that board and I'll just pull up the books and so we have a plan some practice we got a plan for it.

I don't have 10.

Yeah, these are the words I think are doable also.

PowerPoint eliminate social media.

Yeah.

Right.

There's no other.

Oh, where do we go?

Oh, do we go for the bottom?

Okay.

So I'm gonna have to read them.

And then we're gonna collecting.

Okay.

So uh if about two more minutes.

And then if if you miss something, don't worry, we can always come back to it.

No idea is a bad idea.

What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna have each if you won't mind, each of you just do a readout.

No explanation, just a read at this point.

Over lunch, we're gonna kind of group them together and see if we can come up and words miss some priorities.

So think big, just read them out.

No justification or explanation at this point.

Well, plenty of time, do that right after lunch.

Looks like everybody's done writing so mayor uh uh to facilitate um uh calling people age person to read them, and if you uh um uh repeat what someone else says, that's okay.

Just these are your ten or so at this point.

You know what?

I'll uh why don't I start?

Okay, thank you, Mayor.

Um the ones that we've uh I I support and embrace the three that we uh heretofore have identified.

So uh they're public safety, um health care and economic development.

In addition to that, I would like to add the following possibilities.

I listened when our uh our constituents spoke during public comments, and I agree that housing um which to me also includes um uh working on the homeless crisis, so it's all connected, but housing and homelessness, um education, and while I know we have uh a robust uh uh Clark County School District, we still have a number of things that the city should and could be partnering with on that.

Uh increase cultural and art opportunities.

I think that's very important for a livable community.

Um and uh transit options.

I would like to see us working with the other jurisdictions and coming up with other opportunities for transportation, so possibility of getting people out of their cars and and um getting to their uh their place of employment and and other places that they want to go.

So those are my seven.

Oh, we're just gonna collect your stick them so we can group them together.

And uh while we're collecting mine, Sandra, would you like to turn our speak next?

You're still okay, Francis?

Yes, it's okay to repeat too.

Just just yeah, there are definitely some duplicative here.

And I don't even I haven't even counted.

I might have gone over.

That's okay.

The mayor only did seven, so you can have three.

Only have eight.

Jobs decrease unemployment.

More homeownership.

Safe schools.

Attainable housing.

That one's an onion.

Safe roads.

And encourage the feeling of safety in one's home.

Said again, I'm sorry.

Feeling safe in one's home.

Okay, thank you so much.

We'll collect those.

Before I call on Nancy, I want to add one more.

Communication.

I think that is so important.

If the city has programs that help people and point them in the right direction of if they need assistance, if we're not communicating the programs that we have that are available, then we might as well not have them.

And I think that's a shortcoming of government in general is that we don't communicate enough with our constituents, even though we try and we think we do.

I think there's always room for improvement in that area.

Undercommunicating, right?

Can we collect that also one from the mayor?

Okay.

Okay, and with that, um, Nancy.

Okay, I have economic development, quality high wage jobs, job growth, affordable child care, attainable housing, home ownership, reduced homelessness, expanded public transportation, public safety/slash clean safe neighborhoods, and public amenities, specifically parks and sports fields.

Thank you.

Councilmore.

Are you still you're ready?

All right.

Cara.

Thank you.

Economic growth.

Workforce training.

I said proactive workforce training.

Um, quality of life, health care, redevelopment, which is more about in fill development.

I didn't, I know that there was a definition someone had, but I could have gotten that wrong.

Financial management, revenue stability, the unhoused, accessible housing.

Thank you so much, Olivia.

Yes, Madam Mayor, I have public safety slash street safety.

I have health care, economic diversification, cleanliness and beautification of our neighborhoods, improved transit system, workforce training, housing, supporting small businesses, more art, and high wage jobs.

Okay.

So not surprising, public transportation, uh, affordable housing, rental, and purchase, employment diversification.

Um, and I would like to add just to that one, um, that we are careful with how we fund that, meaning that I'm concerned about our tension for always using our own tax dollars first, that when we're diversifying, that we are ensuring that whoever we're working with also has skin in the game in an equitable manner that is going to support our community.

Um public safety, workforce training, uh with jobs at the end of it, um, really a commitment to jobs, um, dealing with homelessness, which deals with housing climate.

Um, some of our neighborhoods, especially the older ones, have heat islands, and I think that's important.

Also, water and pollution also deal with how we um how you know fits into that as well, access to health care, and um I'm as I mentioned before, finding creative ways to get in field development done.

Thank you.

Thank you so much, and uh Mayor Pro Tam.

Thank you, Mayor.

So I had a a couple of, and we talked about this uh Dr.

Riley.

I had some internal focuses.

Uh, one was succession planning.

I think that we need to be aware of that.

Yeah, put everything else in the middle of the year.

I'm going to the second one was fiscal preparedness and preparing for a potential recession, and it's just because I remember 2008, and there's only like a handful of us that were here in the city that put a lot of energy and efforts into preparing for 2008 recession, and so I think we need to be aware of that.

Um I also added some values.

Um I I think outside of our priorities, values for me would be the city as a leader, the city as a convener, the city is a collaborator, uh, and the city as uh bold and competitive.

So those are value statements, the priorities I listed, similar to my colleagues.

I think public safety, and I added street safety, so I c I copied councilman Diaz.

Health care, including mental health care, economic diversification.

Both those fields.

Excellent.

Now, if over lunch you think of others, it's okay, right?

And so what we're gonna do is just for you to think of over lunch, just as a warning, what I'm gonna ask you in the afternoon, is that what problem if this becomes a priority, and we're gonna put them in buckets and do our best or can to to wordsmith what the priority is, and then the council can can assist with that wordsmithing.

But what problems would this address and what outcomes would residents see in three and five years?

So some of you talked already talking in terms of the outcome, right?

But as we put that together, I want you to start thinking about as we come up with these eight or ten or whatever after lunch, is you think of okay.

What is this?

What is the outcome we expect in three to five years if you adopt this?

And then what we're gonna do is then we're gonna work to uh to to pare that down um by uh the end of the session.

Any other questions or comments or concerns about where we're heading?

No.

Great work.

Right.

Okay, thank you so much, Tom.

How much time do we have?

And um, can uh somebody let us know what we are doing now?

Uh we're at breaking for lunch, and where would we be until 1230?

Okay, so we're having lunch until 1230.

And where are we having this lunch?

Excellent.

If you could the count let the council, the mayor and the council uh get their food first, and then we'll let others uh follow.

Okay, cool.

Okay, Tom, I I think we could start.

So I'm going to reconvene the uh special uh city council meeting.

Thank you, Mayor.

So um the plan for the afternoon would be um we're gonna see if we can agree upon these broad buckets.

Now, this is what we put together.

If you have better words or things should be done differently, speak up.

Um, but at this point, we're not arguing uh or or or or or suggesting what is most important.

We're just agreeing upon that these are the broad buckets, and we've categorized them well.

We have nine of them, which is kind of what we thought.

We thought it would be 10, so you all kind of came up with nine.

And then once we agree upon the broad buckets, I'm gonna ask you that question.

What is the possible outcome?

I mean, what do we want things to look like in three to five years?

Then after we kind of agree, whether it's nine or it goes down to six, then we're gonna do the dot game.

So you have each three dots, and I'm gonna ask you to use one dot per area of the most in priority.

Now, you could have more than three, but we have three dots that you'll go through and kind of just walk through.

Then we'll kind of go we'll we'll reassess uh the important thing is that you feel that you're able that your important issues are addressed.

Now, some of that may be operationalized, right?

In the broad goal.

So uh once we agree these priorities, the direction the board may give also is that you we want to ensure that this isn't a top priority, but it is operationalized under public safety.

So that's the type of direction that'd be very helpful uh to staff when they kind of come back with what the strategic plan is.

Okay, so I'm gonna start with the parking, and again, if you don't agree with this, well, I know this group has no problem pushing back if they disagree, but I felt like I had to say it.

And I'm gonna walk around if you don't mind.

Um can you hear me okay?

Yeah, okay.

So on the pocket uh parking lot issue.

This is kind of our thought, and we're gonna kind of pull this back here unless anyone has any pushback and disagree.

Quality of life, we'd argue that that kind of permeates all of them.

That you know that that is something that would kind of permeate all your major priorities.

The financial management, revenue stability, fiscal preparedness.

Um that is something that's gonna be operationalized, that financial stability and how you are going to be able to fund your major priorities is something you're gonna operationalize, and that you should see as a as a as a board in your strategic plan when it comes back.

Because if you do not have finances and revenue and financial stability, you're not gonna do it able to do any of your priorities.

That's kind of our thought.

But again, if you if you disagree, let me know.

Um the uh focused on internal and secession planning.

Um I I believe the city manager has a thematic goal that is employee wellness.

Again, that is something we would say important needs to be addressed, whether you address that internal uh thematic goal that you have that currently right now is focused on employee wellness.

Maybe that is kind of revamped, or this is something that's added.

Because I think this came up uh quite a few times on the issue of do uh we have a lot of turnover.

Do we have a good plan to to ensure that we have leadership?

Um the regional communication, the communication, um, we would argue again that becomes the tool that you need to see that operationalized in your strategic plan, right?

That that how you're gonna do that again.

If you do health care, you're not gonna be able to do that unless you have regional cooperation.

And so the how to, the how is going to operationalize that, right?

Same thing with communication to the mayor's point.

You can have all the great programs you want, but if you don't communicate, right?

We seem to undercommunicate.

We don't communicate and let citizens know that this these exist, you know, why have the priority?

So again, we would say that that is something that is operationalized.

And so I'm gonna keep these on the side.

Councilwoman.

Not that I want communication pulled out, but but I disagree with you to the extent that we do these things, therefore, communication will happen.

And I think the mayor brought that up, did you not?

Thank you.

And the point that I took away from that is it can always be improved, and that since we are here to serve the citizens, that has to be the way that we do it.

So it has to be operationalized.

But what I don't I what I think I think we would do ourselves a disservice to assume that that communication would necessarily come as a result of us making something a priority, unless it is there's a focus on it to do it better and well.

And that's that's not a comment to change anything.

I just I think I think that's a nuance that um is important at least to me.

Uh, councilwoman, would you argue that that should be a separate priority, or are you saying that that has to be an underpinning, right?

When when it's operational.

I wouldn't say it has to be an underpinning.

Yeah, and I as a I think there was a very good point the mayor brought it up there too.

If you if you know, if you're not stressing, and that's the type of direction that's very helpful to staff, right?

That they that that has to be the underpinning.

And then we have the notes that's when this strategic plan comes back, that's what you need to make sure you're looking for, right?

May I add uh just a push back a little bit further on that we will not be able to have direct consistent communication with the commun with the community as a board.

I think that we also need to expand that need for communication with our frontline employees and us.

How do we ensure that we are tracking that we are quantifying in some manner whether or not our communication is reaching the public, and the people that will hear that response is our employees, right?

So I think that a core value in all of this has to be that we are moving to communicate with the community, and when they respond to our outreach and they're talking to our employees, that we then have a process in place for that information to be filtered to us on a regular basis so that we can respond accordingly.

I I don't think that we will ever know, because we are separated kind of um just from our and and there's only so many doors you can knock on so many times you can be out in public.

But the people who work um in and doing this face-to-face with whatever we choose, public safety, health care, whatever, they're the ones who know best.

And I think we need to ensure that we've got a uh pipeline.

And I think that's clear direction you just give me on what you want to see in the strategic plan.

Um and then the issue on the uh the values.

We we we we parked here as that discussion of values that you currently have, whether that's revisited or not, that we just put that in the parking lot here, that these were addressed.

Is everybody okay with the parking lot?

Can I remove that?

We'll keep it in the back if we need to resurface it, and then we'll go to the nine areas.

Okay, so what was parking?

I thought we were talking about parking lots.

Oh, yeah, uh actually having a parking lot.

You're putting all that so you're parking all of these things under that.

Yeah, and so basically this is clear direction on the issue of staff, right?

So this is not necessarily gonna be a an external priority you're gonna adopt, but these are important directions that staff is good when they operationalize it.

So I'm gonna that's why I say parking lot, I'm gonna put it in the back, because that isn't gonna surface your major external priority.

Exactly.

But all the points that you brought up there is the direction you just gave staff that you want to see in the operational plan.

Okay, that helps clarify it.

Yeah, and sorry about that.

No, no, no.

Because I'm I was thinking parking lot, that should be under economic development.

Why is it over the economy?

Yep.

Okay.

Okay, thank you, Anthony.

We'll move that.

Okay, so why don't we just go very broadly?

And again, what we're trying to do at this time is just to get the broad the the broad areas, and whether anything can be combined, or whether it everybody feels at least their issue was addressed one of those priorities.

We're we're gonna vote later on the importance.

So one was not surprising was the issue of health care that came up there everywhere from access to quality health care, um your current priority right now, a lot of support.

You know, uh that was repeated several times.

There was also something on the issue of arts and leisure, right?

That surfaced several times of cultural opportunities, more art, um, you know, public opportunities around issues of soccer, baseball, running tracks, etc.

So we're kind of just broadly put that under arts and leisure at this point.

We may have to combine it or um youth and education.

Um so anywhere from affordable uh child care, youth development, um, issues of education, kind of you know that the the that supportive added value role of of education in the community.

Um that's kind of this is a broad area.

Now we can come back to that too, whether you think, well, maybe we should separate out youth from education, but right there we lumped them together.

So but y'all can come back and here is uh attainable housing.

So this one we kind of lumped issues of the unhoused, uh accessible housing, uh homelessness, rental purchasing, affordable housing, uh kind of lumped them together in the issue of attainable housing.

Now, some could argue maybe we want something for the unhoused or homeless separate.

Just to begin with, we lumped them together here under this area of attainable housing.

Again, we can change how they're characterized any time.

Uh then economic development.

So broadly, we looked at economic development and economic diversification.

Jeremy made it important uh uh uh distinction between the two that we still lumped them together because how you operationalize that, you can still you know uh adhere to that, you know, economic diversification, new folks coming in, development is is internally, and that can be within one broad area again is how you operationalize.

So initially we just lumped it together with economic development at this point.

Uh seem to see some clusters around workforce training, um jobs, workforce training, job growth, wages, qu uh quality highway jobs, workforce increase household wealth, uh employment diversification.

Um kind of lumped it all together into this workforce training at this point.

They seem to kind of surface quite a bit as a climate and natural resources, um, kind of just as a uh as a as a standalone issues of water, heat, pollution, kind of just as a as a standalone.

Uh public transportation came up quite a bit, right?

Uh transit options, improved transit systems, uh expand public transportation.

You know, clearly RTC has that major role too, but a big issue facing citizens, right?

Kind of just broadly put under issue with the public transportation, and then public safety, your current uh uh uh goal and put everything from feeling safe to safe rules, safe schools, you know, anything involving the issue of community safety.

And then public safety, your current uh uh uh goal and put everything from feeling safe to safe rules safe schools, you know, anything involving the issue of community safety.

So are these kind of lumping together okay at this point, or is it is anyone want to argue for a separation out or something that was totally missed.

Mayor, is it is it?

I as a matter of fact, yeah, and exactly that's why I went through the very instead of asking for permission, just go ahead.

Okay.

Councilwoman.

Okay.

I have a couple of thoughts.

I will share that since I'm the only one that did child care.

My thinking was that it really was related more to workforce training because and economic development, because we've seen in some cities the labor participation rate has fallen because child care is so expensive, so people are staying home.

So that was one comment.

And then like I I excuse me, councilwoman.

So uh if everyone's okay with that, I'm we're gonna go ahead and move that to workforce okay.

Okay.

Thanks, Anthony.

And then I guess sort of the work that we've done in health care to some degree is almost like you know, a sub point of economic development.

You think about our medical district, our arts district, our entertainment, right?

It's all towards the goal of economic development.

And so I don't know whether sort of health care should be kind of under economic development.

But my related point is I think climate is really important, but it doesn't really stand out on its own.

But when I think about what it means, it's about healthy communities.

So I don't know whether healthy communities is like the big goal, and then you could have climate underneath, and also some of the work that we're doing in health.

Okay, let's let's go with that last point first, and then we'll jump to the healthcare diversification.

So the suggestion here was that perhaps not climate and and and natural resources is maybe broadly talk about healthy communities and put that as kind of a subgroup.

How's everybody feel about that?

I absolutely agree that it cannot, it it should not stand by itself.

Um when we have communities that are are too hot, we don't have people that want to live there.

So now we are forcing people to choose whether to stay put and build community, okay, or to give up and move away.

Um when we have communities that are too hot, we don't have access to leisure activities.

Uh we don't have kids outside.

Um, and and if you live in a neighborhood that is hot, uh you can see that there's divestment somehow we things get paved over.

And so I think that climate directs us in whether or not we have economic development, um, whether or not we have workforce training, all those things, the environment of that community is determines all the other stuff that falls away from it.

So that healthy communities capture that.

Is everybody comfortable with that?

Okay, councilman, let's go to the the other issue brought up is that is health care a standalone, or is that under the issue of economic development?

Thoughts?

Um, I think it it's important enough to standalone, but uh when you think it these are all connected, if kind of education also, if you're gonna have economic uh diversification and development, you're gonna need to have a strong education system.

That doesn't mean that I would recommend that education would go under economic development, but it plays a major role, and so does health care.

And you could end up kind of giving the direction too to your point that um whether it fits under workforce development, if that's a standalone, maybe education fits there, if not that it fits an operation under there.

So I think when we start collapsing them, yeah, I think the the important thing staff needs to hear from y'all is that where it might fit and that you want it highlighted in these areas.

If that makes sense.

I want to well, are you whenever you're done, Mayor?

Okay, I'll just a quick Tom.

Do you envision like uh the uh uh black letter law and then under let's say um uh uh economic uh development and then have sub uh uh subsections under that, which is that is clearly one way to go if if you you feel like you're getting too many priorities and you want to collapse some and the direction that the council gives is to ensure that it's operationalized under there.

So it clearly talks about a sub-issue.

So for example, let's use that example uh from the councilwoman is that if it did fall under health care under economic development, it would be highlighted as as a as a sub area in the strategic plan.

Because I think uh we can't um I know that we're thinking broadly and and um uh you know whatever, uh just uh just put it out there, but the reality is if we are serious talking about priorities that are important to the council and the city, that it has to be limited in number because then we can't concentrate on this is like major priorities, and if we don't limit those major priorities, not that other things aren't important, but they uh we can't be all things to all people because then we're gonna be uh we're not gonna be anything to anybody.

And I think that's the danger to keep in mind too.

That's the danger, Mayor.

Yeah.

I just wanted to add to the question of whether we keep health care as a standalone or put it um as a subset to economic development.

I really think um if we take the information that Jeremy Aguero shared in his presentation, and how quickly we've grown as a city and how um we are still um catching up with that growth.

One of the major areas that we are sorely lacking in is in the health care as a daughter to aging parents, as a mother of a teen.

Um it is sometimes so difficult to find the health care providers to even address the healthcare needs.

Now, if we think about it from our constituents' point of view too, they have medical deserts, they also don't have access to care, and it's very hard for them to even pay sometimes to even have preventative care.

So I feel very passionately, not just because the medical district exists and we're trying to highlight and um and um just make sure that work doesn't go by the wayside, but we just have so much more work to be done in that space, and health matters, health matters, like you have to be housed healthy and hired to have the opportunity to live your best life.

And so for me, I just feel like we need to catch up, and this is an area that we do have to be very concerted, that we do have to put extra emphasis on and not lose sight of because if not, then we're gonna continue to hobble along uh with an inadequate offering of health services to our community and lack of specialists and having to go out of state to seek treatment for things that we should be growing here, especially with the medical school now in southern Nevada, especially with other medical schools that are offering opportunities.

So, how do we then come together and talk about how we keep our residents here so that they can practice long term and that kind of fits in to workforce training and making sure that our residents have the first bite at the apple of being the doctors and the nurses and everything that comes with a health care workforce?

Those are my two cents.

So at this point, you're you're arguing to keep it as a separate.

Yeah, and again, you know, we're gonna do with that.

We have a process that we can collapse later if needed, but at this point, you're arguing healthcare separate.

Sorry.

Yeah, I I love this conversation.

I've been pretty engrossed in the whole medical side for for a while now.

Um, and what I found is you really can't talk about health care without involving higher education.

I think that's some of the challenges we faced is going out and trying to develop the medical district.

We put a hundred million dollars into it, and if the universities decide not to participate, it's all for naught.

And so we have got to figure out how to, in my opinion, be bold, be creative, bring all those players to the table and find a meaning for them to come in and provide better health care.

So we have to be involved in higher education, we have to be involved in education, and all of those things, by the way, we can't talk about diversifying our economy without higher education either.

Like it's all very connected.

Right.

Um, and I think to the councilwoman's point by having it as just a uh a bullet point of a priority, it does kind of plant a flag to the rest of the community saying this is what we're focused on, you need to come and listen.

So I'm I like having our three, the three that we have now, I think are are great, and I love having these conversations around like transit in particular because they all kind of fold into each other.

It's how we how we provide feedback, I guess, to the staff on what they prioritize and what they focus in on their time.

And then you know, when that strategic plan comes out there, that these important subgroups are highlighted in there, and there's a clear understanding of how that is interrelated, right?

And that contributes to the uh overall priority.

And if you're successful in in one area, like it just breeds success in every other area.

Other comments about or so at this point, keep them separate and then we can see how it goes.

Okay, healthcare deserves uh priority of its own, in my opinion.

Acknowledging how interrelated it is to some of those other areas what else?

Um okay, let me ask you this.

Do you see any combining at this point?

Any that we could kind of we have nine right now.

Uh is there any that we can kind of lump together there may be some consensus on right now.

There may be some consensus on right now.

So let's feel go ahead, counsel.

I think that we could combine workforce training with economic development.

Oh, okay, oh, and I think that they are absolutely related.

If we attract businesses, we train people to work those businesses, and we have jobs at the end of that training, that's part of economic development.

And how do we uh attract people to come here with the promise that we can take whatever their their business model is, their need for employees to find ways to train them up to be in those spaces?

So I think that for me, I think that could go together.

Other thoughts on that before we don't uh with with that idea of combining?

I'm aware up, sorry, Sandra, where are we combining that workforce training?

I think we can put economic development under workforce training.

Oh, work, I'm sorry, workforce.

Workforce under economic training.

Under economic development.

Olivia.

Yeah, I agree with that.

I was actually gonna mention that, but I also have been eyeing like the standalones on this side of the room, and so I was thinking if we already retitled healthy communities, do we then put arts and leisure under healthy community?

Do we put youth and education under healthy communities because that really is what's gonna provide that support um to make that transformational work in our communities happen?

Um so I was thinking, can we kind of take healthy communities and merge some of these other subcategories together?

So so uh let me uh address that first issue, and we're gonna come right back to that.

So is there a consensus that the broader title at this point will be economic development, and we're gonna move workforce training as uh uh uh under this?

Agreed.

Okay, is is anybody have heartburn or concern at this point?

No.

Okay.

I have a question about potentially including that with education.

It's just a question though, I don't know if how strongly I feel about it if education and workforce training go together.

I think they're turned.

Yeah, they do.

And did they have to be mutually exclusive?

No.

Uh okay, then workforce training could possibly go under two categories as a bullet point.

Yeah.

I think so uh right now we're gonna take workforce training and we're putting it under economic development.

So we're we're down to eight.

And then and then let's let's keep that idea about the education about where that might fit.

But let's jump uh uh to council uh councilwoman uh Diaz idea about if we relabel this healthy communities.

Are there other areas that we would want to lump in together?

And and were you specifically looking perhaps at art and leisure?

Yeah, as one obvious how's everybody feel about that?

Yes.

Okay, so we'll m let's move art and leisure and put that under healthy communities.

I think transportation could also go under healthy communities.

And it could could we change from health, can it be healthy and livable communities?

Because I uh when I think of health, I have a uh definition of healthy in my mind.

What is your doctor husband meaning?

Right, it's about healthy and livable communities, we're we're drafting that right now.

Um I think you could put more under there if it's uh healthy and livable.

Okay, so healthy and livable communities we're gonna put here, right?

And then we're putting over there.

Cleanliness are cultural opportunities, public amenities like soccer, baseball, and alignment.

So we we're oh we're oh perfect.

And livable.

Okay.

And then the potential for transportation.

And then uh try public transportation as a as a subgroup under the issue of good.

Would help them also be.

Now now let me just throw something out here too.

As you're looking at combining and and this goes to uh councilman to your uh issue about education.

We put youth and education together, so youth development.

Do we want to separate that?

And is youth development fit under healthy communities and education under I work for one question because you mentioned earlier that the council shouldn't be so concerned about graduation rates, not that we're not concerned, but it's not a priority.

Um, but we also we I think we do have an obligation, and you see it up here to find a way to create higher paying jobs, and you can't do that without supporting education and higher education.

So high paying jobs is the goal, how we get there is we need to bring people to the table.

And I think that part of that is that becomes additive.

You don't want to own the graduation rate, but as uh with workforce development and and and these opportunities, you definitely want to support that because that's important to the community.

Yep, absolutely.

So let me let me just uh so with the youth education, do we need to separate that or is that okay at where it's at?

Having one youth under healthy livable communities or keep it as is.

I personally would advocate for putting youth and education under workforce because a lot of the work that we do with youth now is our strong future, it's around job training, soft skills training, and so it it is with the goal of workforce development.

So Anthony, we uh can we move youth and education and we're gonna put that under uh uh economic development, right?

But under workforce training.

So yeah, so it would be kind of a subgroup under workforce training, right?

So we have workforce training, uh and then under workforce training, we're gonna have you making this facilitation really easy.

May I add something else as well?

Public uh transportation, I think also has a nexus with um economic development.

Uh we've got to we we have to realize that if people can't get to work, yeah, right, they will not be able to sustain themselves.

So we can train them, but if the jobs are in Henderson or someplace to the north and we can't get them there, they will not sustain employment.

And we we should try to imagine a city with fewer cars on the road, right?

Um, and how we do that is to imagine and implement transportation options that are you know destigmatized that are comfortable and are necessary.

We have to look at transit as necessary and change our messaging and how we do things, and I'll I'll and I'm in a soapbox for a minute, so just pair with it.

Okay, um we we have capital improvement programs and and we build eight lane roads, and then we're complaining that we have traffic and we have pollution and we have heat.

If we want this to be, and we talk about pedestrian safety, here it is, all this safety, safety, safety, but we're not doing anything proactive to change the way our human mind looks at transportation.

If we want people to be on a bus, we have to make them show up regularly.

If we want people to walk for a healthy community, we have to have sidewalks wide enough for people to walk side by side with trees to shade them.

If we want people to get out of their cars, stop building eight-lane roads, make them two lanes, and make other modes of transportation accessible and normalized.

I lived in Europe, people walked all the time.

They they it was normal to ride your bicycle, even in a skirt.

I I never thought that I would see that, but women learned how to one leg hop on a bike.

It was normal behavior because someone decided it was normal and they facilitated the normality of that, and I think that that's part of what we've got to do.

So I don't want to say you're looking at moving public uh transportation, not moving public transportation, or keeping it as a yes, but I think that we have to recognize that it's intertwined and nexus.

Yes, perfect.

So we're leaving that uh as uh at least right now.

So um so we're down to five at this at this point.

So we have health care, we have healthable and livable communities that we've included, you know, anywhere from the arts to expanding transportation, climate issues, etc.

We have uh attainable housing to also include issues around affordable housing in the unhoused.

Um then we have um economic development that has a strong you know sub group of of workforce training that includes obviously the issue of education and how the city is additive and supportive of education, and then we have public safety.

So is anything missing?

Did do did we miss something where it's not under one of these five broad areas?

I don't think so.

I I would I mean I could be wrong about that.

It's a question for I guess the council is I I think you could possibly move the attainable housing under healthy and livable communities as well.

Oh, I think housing is such a big big issue, it needs its own category.

I mean, I I like the three we currently have, and I'd like to add housing uh and homelessness to that.

I I yeah, I was hoping for four because I want to add that, but I can't think of the other three that which one would I delete.

I can't think of any.

I had a question.

Sure.

Councilwoman.

Thanks, Dr.

Ryler.

Um right now, and maybe this is also uh Mr.

Jansen question.

Are they listed in priority order?

No, no.

Okay, so it's not now or the priorities we have.

The three we have now, are they prioritized?

Public safety and health care and economics.

I think they were.

I thought public safety was number one.

No, yeah, that's what we always we always refer to public safety being our number one priority.

In my mind, it was prioritized, but it's not.

Yeah, so according to city manager.

I'm getting a negative.

Okay.

Yeah, um, I mean, you could obviously do that.

Underline public safety is a priority, but there's already established there just the three priorities work with all the deliver that from the and then also if my memory doesn't fail me, councilwoman, it was based on survey feedback that we received from our residents year after year when we deploy the survey, the number one priority that our residents are manifesting to us is public safety.

So we try to make sure that if we're hearing from our residents that public safety is what is important and top of mind for them, that we're placing an extra emphasis in that vein because that's what we're hearing from the people we were elected to serve.

So that's kind of how I know that we've kind of put an extra emphasis on public safety is because we are hearing it from the majority of Las Vegans that that is an area of concern for them.

That's back to the Maslow's hierarchy of people don't feel safe, nothing else is possible.

That's correct.

And it's where the majority of your budget goes.

Well, can I I I don't think that I'm being a naysayer, but I think from the from my lived experience and my own personal perspective, lack of feeling public safe is a result of all the things that we're talking about.

We we look at public safety to me as if it is this thing set aside.

But to me, when we have high unemployment and we have people who feel hopeless, and our kids don't feel like they're getting good education, and and they're feeling hopeless, we have issues with public safety because they start acting out.

When we have people who don't have housing, when we have people sleeping on the street and people are shocked by what they see, then we want more public safety.

But what we're really saying is we're feeling hopeless.

We don't know why we have people sleeping on the street.

So then we say we need more public safety to address that, but that's an outcome of another problem.

And I think that we are displacing our our need to have all this public safety, but we're not looking at the root cause.

Are we looking at the problem or do we want to find a solution?

When we have people who don't have health care that are sleeping on the street, that when now we have to have recuperative care, and then people are freaking out about it.

It's not that we need more police to do that.

We need to address health care.

We need to address whether or not we have open space for our kids to be outside and not on these things.

Because when they are inside and they're cutting up, we end up with a mess that we feel like our only solution is public safety.

So I think that we're we're I think people are reacting to their to their confusion and frustration.

I don't know that our traditional thought of what public safety brings is going to answer these real issues.

At this point, are you okay with leaving it as a separate uh with the idea of it being a good thing?

Oh, of course.

I think it needs to be, I think we need to acknowledge that it is its own thing, but I want us to um I would like us as a community and as community leaders to start to dig a little bit deeper into the causation of why we feel this way, and the causation I think is some of these other things.

And if we really put emphasis on addressing education, homelessness, houselessness, um, economic development, opportunity and hope.

I think we will have less people feeling uncomfortable and unsafe.

I I a hundred percent agree with you.

I was just gonna comment how I think about it and whether this is right or wrong.

Is this the city of Las Vegas, all the municipalities in the state are a backstop to what I would consider a state that's failed to fund education, failed to fund transportation, failed to fund housing systems, failed to fund every system, health care systems in particular right now, and we're the backstop.

So all we got is public safety, and then we try to inch our way towards these values that our constituents probably hold, but for whatever reason our state has missed the mark from when it was incepted.

There, there was no forethought into thinking about how do we fund these systems that people need, and now we're stuck being a backstop.

I agree, but I I think that this is part of this communication, and this is part of this collaborative effort that we have to put forth, and that is working with our peers, uh the counties, the other municipalities, and our legislative leaders to really talk about the causation and and not funding these things leaves us in a place where we're we're just chasing it's whack-a-mole and we're not getting we're not getting any traction.

That's the the values for me as being that bold innovative group of elected leaders that convenes people to say here's here's what the real issues are.

We're gonna step forward and say maybe we have some solutions and hopefully build a better Nevada.

And remember though, we're talking about uh I don't disagree with anything you're saying, but I think it's very important that we are in our lane as the city, and we uh again we can solve I also would like world peace right now, and yeah, but I can't do that.

Yes with my magic wand.

So I think it's very important that when we're dealing with here we are trying to find what are our city priorities.

Are we gonna add um do we like the three we already have?

Are we gonna add one or two extra ones?

But it has to be things that the city can deal with because I know uh that uh people uh uh I find uh now that I'm mayor that they attribute all sorts of abilities to me.

Um you know, you could go solve the homeless problem and take care of this and and uh plant more trees, and those are things we can do, but uh the things that we can't do, I think we ought not promise or raise expectations when there is it's not it's not possible for the city council to actually deliver on that promise.

So let's be careful with our promises.

And mayor, I think you bring up a good point, and and I would just advise the council as the priority setters that when you get back to strategic plan, you want to see how the outcomes, right?

How you operationalizing, and this is the message you're sending to the to city residents, but how they operation, so you're not being held responsible for something you have no control over.

So you make a very good question.

Maybe I can't tell you, and this is just I think we've all experienced this.

Uh you know, Shelley, when you got elect when you get elected, I have to talk to you about the airport and what a mess it is, and that I said, Well, I really, you know, the I really don't have anything to do with the airport.

Oh, you don't?

Well, how about I gotta talk to you about the par uh cost of parking on the strip?

Well, I can't do anything about that.

And that's well, what the hell is your job?

And so I think what do you do?

Yeah, what exactly do you do?

And I think we need to do well what we can do, and not do again be all things to all people and not deliver on anything.

Can I I'm sorry, uh Nancy and then Olivia.

Sorry, at the risk of angering my colleagues, you asked us something was missing.

Um, and I realized no, I know.

Because if you look at our budget, whether it's a priority consciously or not, we do spend a significant amount of resources on animal welfare, and so I think we should add animal welfare to either public safety because currently it falls under DPS or uh healthy and livable communities.

But given that this document will inform my priorities, we either need to consciously decide we're not gonna do it or do it, and then we just need to add it if we're we're we're best, do you think uh animal.

Only under public safety.

That's why.

Um yes, I just wanted to comment to not lose sight of um, you know, everything put together would give us the best and most vibrant Vegas, but there are some struggles that we do have still on so many fronts.

Um we just talked about the health care woes that our community lacks.

And PT just mentioned how we're so deficient in so many systems that are supposed to be state funded, and we don't even have the funding coming to us to make more um just more ground on a lot of just different um things that do affect our residents and constituents.

But I don't want to lose my constituents' voices too on the public safety front, because um recently I've had a lot of fires coming through my office about the number of elements that take over a home in a community that's vacant, someone's passed away, they note that a house is empty, and all of these elements take hold of these homes, and then the rest of the neighborhood becomes held hostage because you have people who deal drugs who are pimps and are prostituting our youth out in the streets, and then you have a community saying we need help, and this is not right, and how come my kids that have to walk to school have to see this element and riffraff in our community?

It's not right.

And so while I know that not all people are created equal, and I know not all folks in our community are the same.

And so while I know that not all people are created equal, and I know not all folks in our community are the same, there are certain elements that we do need to have tools to be able to deploy and keep our neighborhoods safe, and that it doesn't matter where I live, whether I live in Ward 2 or Ward 3, I should be having the same safe environment for my kids to grow up in.

And I that's where I have to lean on public safety.

Do we want to put maybe code enforcement just as a code enforcement?

And that even for my small businesses, I'm hearing a lot all the time too, how they're struggling and the elements around them that are making it harder to attract and retain businesses.

We want everyone living their best life, their life, the best business, but it's part of the equation, and we have to figure out while we're trying to put all of these other processes and services in place, but if folks aren't taking them and they're deciding to do something that's wrong by our community, we should have also a remedy to that.

We can't let people just go rogue.

And I'm gonna just comment on that because it is probably the majority of the calls that I get as well.

So it's it's one house, one family or group of people that come and inhabit a house that destabilize an entire neighborhood.

So it is a public safety issue, and while it may not be one of the three priorities, like I know I've talked to the city team about it a lot, is we have to be very aggressive with our code enforcement who has to align with Metro, who has to align with the health district, who has to do all these things to try to take care of that one house that before it destabilites destabilizes an entire neighborhood.

That's important feedback too when they operationalize this about how they weave that in there.

So at this point, um we have these five areas.

Um if we could just take health care and just anybody can jump in, just look at possible outcomes.

And this serves two processes.

So in three to five years, if done well, what does that look like?

That also helps inform staff as they put together what is the outcome you're responsible for, right?

You know, again, you don't want to be held responsible for things you have no control over.

So if we start in health care, and we think, you know, what is it addressed, and what what are the possible outcomes in three to five years when you get a report out on this?

What what ideally would you one is the outcome?

I see medical district being built out, and so we're providing the um uh the health care options that people need.

I mean, ultimately we want to be able to provide access to affordable health care.

How do we do that?

We need to attract more health care providers.

We need to ensure, as Jeremy said, and I sound like a broken record, we need to work with the legislature and the governor to have more residency programs to keep our graduating medical students here.

And it's also uh uh aside uh economic development, uh the reality is that the state of Nevada is spending a fortune educating future doctors, and when they graduate, since we don't have the requisite number of residency programs, they are forced to go uh for their graduate medical education to other states.

70% uh of doctors end up practicing where they do their residencies.

So we as taxpayers are spending a small fortune educating future doctors that are gonna be practicing someplace else because we don't have the residency programs to keep them here, and that is a tremendous waste of uh taxpayer money.

So, in addition to those two, I heard two more issues.

One is that uh uh increased acts access to affordable health care, which can be tied in there, and also is to your convener role is that how you working with feds very important private uh in in order to bring these here because you don't have the ability in addition to increasing, but again, the city uh the city council cannot do that.

We have to work with the legislature to see if they uh to work with them to educate them so that they know that uh Medicaid reimbursement is very, very important, and a lot of this is kind of the unknown because we don't know what's happening in the federal government, and so uh they are playing uh larger and larger role in these things that are gonna impact us in either a very positive or an extremely negative way.

So the city has provided the place, right, for this to happen, but it's convening how you bring others to the table to make that happen.

I I would add to that, uh and this was Mike's idea, but I take credit for it completely.

Uh, is the medical district being the training ground for the medical professionals in Nevada?

So we'll have dental training, we'll have nurse training, we'll have medical doctor training.

I think we're moving into the mental and behavioral health training.

Could you describe the difference?

Could you describe the difference tactic strategies and outcome the NSU already so it's so it's the training ground of the health care professionals in Nevada and on the economic side like this is an outcome is that we bring high paying jobs into the medical district which go into the arts district and have a lot of fun and train in the medical district and so we're we're we're doing two things at the same time is we need high paying jobs to stay in that area in order for those areas to thrive.

So part of this and then staff will will tease us out there of you know the strategy to get to the outcome which is okay because I think that those are really important for direction for staff too.

So we even though if we're mixing a little strategy with outcome um I still think that's good direction uh for staff on those does that kind of capture the kind of the major outcomes that we you know in three to five years when you come back as a board right and look at were we successful in these areas yeah can you can you just read them out yeah I'd like to add to the health care um I'd also want um our wet seas et sees and metzies um to also be part of that health care um continuum where we are training technicians as well um so that they are supporting those doctors those nurses um and my dream is that historic West Las Vegas and the surrounding area become a community where these folks want to live and have easy access to those jobs by bus or walking or bicycling or whatever because it's nearby and so that we expand this um this atmosphere that's not the word I want to say but that we just start to see this this movement of young people who would need and want these jobs living in the downtown area and and growing their themselves as humans but also their families because it's the cool and the and the happening place to be.

Chandra is isn't this how we're envisioning Cashman field uh that uh changing cashman field into uh uh uh uh workforce housing where we have teachers and firefighters and uh medical technicians all living and and and thriving in that particular area revitalizes that part of town it's very very close to downtown Las Vegas and also um the historic west side so that's uh that's how I see the linchpin of of um of cashman is that it will have a purpose not only um economic development because there'll be businesses there and lots of other amenities restaurants I hope various businesses but you also have um uh the workforce housing and it's it's close to the medical district and especially if we bring the other university have UNLV we just signed an agreement with uh divided about eight uh and I know Toro is interested in doing a um a clinic down there so if we're concentrating all of our educational entities down there it becomes a true medical district where we not only are educating people but we're providing a four not affordable workforce housing that is affordable and I I just the I it's in my head and I just see it so clearly and I think that's something that we can see within three to five years.

Is it is that capture what both you and the mayor talking about I I think so and I and I don't and cash man is is one portion because that's going to be for purchase homes that's the what I've been told by the developer that they want to sell.

Yeah but I think we also have to look at what is happening in historic West Las Vegas which is the closest portion one of the closer uh areas and even some downtown properties that those will be opportunities for some rental opportunities for folks hopefully workforce um or at least attainable to also feed into the same atmosphere um we just have to be intentional about what we're trying to do that it's a good combination of for sell and for rent um and that we are intentional about the education that we are offering but also intentional about our partners offering jobs at the end I think if without that we're just training to for training sake we've got to let people know that we're serious about if we're working with you at the end of this is job training and economic development these folks have to have jobs.

And look, these are uh we know that if we can produce health care providers, they'll have uh uh I know from personal experience at Turo, uh other than uh the graduating future doctors could say have three more years of training.

If you're um uh physical therapists, occupational nurse practitioners, PAs, they have a job before they graduate.

So we know if we can educate people, they will have a good, good paying job.

And with many of the PAs, you're talking about a six-figure salary right out of school.

And that is um and that uh gives them an opportunity to uh buy of uh by how uh buy suitable housing that will only increase as their salaries go up.

So I there it's it's a whole continuum, but it's a very exciting one.

And I think we can do I I know we can do this, we have to do it because we have such a tremendous uh uh uh uh shortage in the health care field.

So we could easily support.

I mean, where we uh statewide, we're two thousand doctors short of what we need to be for the population we have.

Imagine if we can fill 2,000 jobs uh with doctors and and the other um the health care professions.

I mean, thousands and thousands of jobs that are here already and need people need to be educated and uh trained to take those jobs.

Great.

I'm gonna add just this is the metric that I think on the back end, and I know you're not there yet, but like the percentage of healthcare professionals in Nevada that came from the medical district.

And so that's that might be missing there, is it's the training ground for health care professionals.

And then also, could we add um increased partnerships with higher ed?

Yes, very definitely.

Yeah, they're just making the point that they're capturing all the notes here too.

Exactly that.

Um anything else on healthcare before we move to uh catch Tom increase partnerships with higher ed yeah, and healthcare and you should know this one, former chancellor rightly.

Health care and mental health care are synonymous, it's health of everybody, everything.

Okay, with uh attainable housing.

Uh we have increased workforce housing.

This is to deal with the unhoused as well as affordable housing and what are some of the outcomes in three or five years?

Ownership?

Higher home ownership rates.

Higher home home ownership within the city area.

Lower percentage of people's overall income that they're using for housing.

Yeah, I'm just gonna percent of total income going towards housing.

This is also the unhoused too and homelessness, right?

Other outcomes in three or five years, lower homelessness rate.

A tough one, but yeah, that that's definitely something that should be.

I'm sorry, Nancy.

Lower homelessness.

Oh, yeah, definitely.

But the actual number of unhouse decreases, right?

Yeah.

These are good ones.

Any other under the attainable housing?

And again, this is to think about those outcomes, but it's also the direction to staff as they pull these together.

So these are really good.

Okay, if we move to healthy and livable communities, can I just add one more for their take on the other?

Yes, councilwoman.

Uh new starts, number the increase the number of new starts, new buildings that go up that either are considered affordable or attainable.

Um we've got to build right in order to get there.

We're looking at the actual number of increasing um possible outcomes for healthy and livable communities.

Um we put under this remember uh the transit opportunities, public transportation, the arts, um heat islands, yeah, just uh uh a livable place.

Yeah, for sure.

Outcomes is uh um increased tree canopies.

I'm speaking on behalf of the RTC, it's gonna be a sustainable funding source for transit, which right now that doesn't really exist.

Which you're saying isn't exist, right?

It doesn't exist.

And the RT has some issues with RTC.

So with that sustainable, can you say the phrase you just used?

Funding source.

Funding source.

Yeah.

Um what underneath that is that the exploration of a rail line down the road and how we would go about funding that, or is that completely separate?

I think the RTC is gonna come forward any day now and say they don't have funding operations to 28, and so they're gonna have to start dipping into construction funding in order to make transit funding possible.

Just to maintain what we currently just to maintain what we currently have, not grow it to all the growth that we talked about with our land, that's not even possible.

And they'll start cutting back in the next two years on transit.

So it's in our best interest to advocate for sustainable funding.

Particularly for the city.

So your outcome was that you're successful in obtaining that sustainable transit funding for the city?

Important elsewhere, but you you know, your residents are you know, that's the outcome you're gonna measure, right?

I can't drop them off as Sahara.

No, no, no, no, no, no.

I get the end of the day, that's gonna be the measurement is that focus they're gonna have to tap into fry dollars.

Question 10 dollars.

Yeah, other um a possible out uh outcomes here too.

Um we had arts, we had cultural opportunities, then we address the transit, um the heat.

I think um how we uh address um our alternative modes of transportation.

So how many um as we are uh doing new capital projects, how are we designing them and and increasing um wider sidewalks and bicycle lanes?

How do we capture our contribution?

Are we are we um considering road diets?

Um infrastructure leading to uh increased square footage of like walkable resources that works too, rockable and just you know, bicycle paths, that kinds of thing, because that as part of the transit opportunity, I think.

Walkable bicycle land, you know, et cetera, where you can actually measure the increase on capital and elsewhere.

And as Thomas said earlier, we're not gonna be wordsing necessarily so that we'll figure out the exact language in the future.

This is really good direction.

So when you come back from strategic plan, these are operationalized in it.

Others on the issue of healthy and livable communities, and this isn't the end all again.

You'll have plenty of opportunity to add input.

I would add increased funding for art, public art installations.

And then I don't know what the wording is, but uh funding for our amenities, like our community centers, our parks, we have a lot of stuff that's sort of been delayed.

Um art and cultural opportunities, yeah.

We're in the design phase, we just want funding to complete all those product projects.

Cultural, yeah.

Is this increased by the same one holds?

Anything else on the livable, healthy and livable communities?

Tom, would you mind reading that for those of us that are challenged with our eyesight?

Uh increased tree canopies, sustainable funding source for the city transportation, and increase square footage of walkable paths, bicycle paths, etc.

Increase funding for the arts and cultural opportunities.

And I think Councilman Bernie, didn't you say something along the lines of finding the means to fund the capital improvement projects for some of our community centers?

The tools parks, right?

Yeah.

It's increases of tools, yeah, to actually utilize the tools that are available to increase the funding.

Or take advantage of them, really, is the is existing tools that are out there.

Um for more sustainable and creative funding of it.

Okay, we'll move over here to economic development and uh FY, we did include the issue of workforce training and the issue of education under this also.

So broad outcomes under the issue of economic development.

So I think a major theme here for I think for the council is economic development means for us.

How do we diverse continue the work to diversify our economy to ensure that not all of our eggs are in the tourism basket?

Uh, because every time we go through an exercise like the pandemic, it really does hurt our community who is heavily service oriented um and service industry oriented, and so then how do we make sure that our moms, our grandpas, our aunts and uncles, et cetera, don't have to go without a job X number of months, and then and then now too with AI coming on the fast pace too, will that create a lot of elimination of jobs?

And so then how do we make sure that our moms, our grandpas, our aunts and uncles, et cetera, don't have to go without a job X number of months, and then and then now too with AI coming on the fast pace too, will that create a lot of elimination of jobs?

And then how do we then re-train and put people on that pathway to prosperity versus the opposite one?

So I think just trying to find different sources of bringing different industries into our city.

Um I think you know, the immersive arts entertainment that area 15 is doing is an example of how the city has had a good partner in diversifying our economy sports economy that Jeremy made.

Uh-huh.

And so I just think we want to continue to like, I know that our innovation center with the tech innovation hub space has been important, but do we just kind of just fund those efforts and they pitter pattern once they have their product and they patent it, they they leave us, right?

But do we want to figure out a way how they grow and they they not only have like the seed and the watering here, but that the roots kind of remain in our city and the expansion efforts rema remain here too.

And that these are jobs again that are above just minimum wage that will provide a dignified life for our residents.

I was gonna say I said I separated out so they have economic diversification for the city, which is includes wards two, four, and six and better paying jobs and all that, but then you also have the RDA, and so that's that's what I try to focus in on just making sure that districts are thriving, that we don't want them to fall in disrepair, because I think you can see some ad elements creeping in to certain parts of our our districts collectively, and we want to make sure that those districts are thriving in the read in the RDA.

Yeah, driving districts.

And they're well defined within our city plan, and I think we need to focus on them, focus on them.

Well, more with um either in film development or jobs or education, or that falls within the driving districts.

I think the outcomes I would look for would be higher average wage, lower unemployment, and lower youth unemployment.

That's right.

Lower youth unemployment in particular.

I think we have the tools to get there.

I think it's the how that we are constantly challenged with.

Um in my term in the legislature, we always just said here are tax incentives, and and please hurry up and come.

And here's a tax incentive.

Um, I'm not sure that we're counting up the cost often what that means on the other end of the tax incentive, which is often a removal of income from our state, right?

And from our local municipalities when that money is extracted for for an um to incentivize someone.

Um but at the same time, are we asking uh or demanding performance from them to ensure that our community gets these jobs, right?

Are we demanding that they stick and stay in our communities for a period of time?

Um I worked for the army uh for a while.

My ex was in the military, and if you go to an academy and they invest all this money in you, um, you owe them five years minimum, right?

And so, how do we um make sure that we are getting the best bang for our book and not just giving away our value without ensuring that these companies come and give us value back, and we are seeing that our value back at the end is better jobs, higher incomes, and employment for our for our folks.

How do we get this exchange and it not just be a one-way street?

I have a question maybe for uh Mike or for Councilman BS.

Is the funding for Wetsea guaranteed, or do we have to um look for sustainable funding?

So if we do, then sustainable funding for our employment training centers would be an outcome.

That's definitely a um a city manager question because the WETSE is in Ward 5 and it's um up and running, but I don't know about the sustainability.

I know that we went working hard to get the dollars to build the Etsy in my area, but I'd love to hear how we're gonna keep the um momentum going once we open our doors.

Yeah, uh the uh capital dollars are coming from the grant and from our overall CIP program to build a facility, and then the agreement we have with CSN is they will be responsible for the funding to operate the uh education facility once it's built.

So it really goes back to that partnership without the partnership from CNN to take the keys and actually run the program, we wouldn't be able to deliver it because just building it doesn't do it.

But where we came in is we secured the grant with the partnership, and then in some cases we uh added some additional CIP dollars to make sure we could cover all the needs for the site preparation and things of that nature.

Thank you.

Okay.

Other uh possible outcomes here.

And again, the the possible outcomes are not etched in stone, your priorities are.

This is the direction you're giving to staff.

So when they operationalize it, you see it there.

So that's the priorities, what you adopt, not the outcomes.

I just want to start thinking and give direction to staff on it.

So opportunity.

I'm wondering if there's an opportunity to also work with our higher ed institutions down south to see if they see anything in the tea leaves of possible job attraction or creation or um because obviously we've seen that most of the sports has gone, not in the city.

Um, but then there's like the bio lab space that has been talked about a lot.

So I think LVGEA is important in the conversation.

I think higher ed is important in the conversation.

So how can we get kind of like a back and forth between just spitballing ideas of what's plausible, what what's happening, especially on the AI front or any other job creation opportunity that we may not be in the NOAA because it's so now and moving so at lightning speed, but maybe our folks uh on the front end uh or in the trenches know more about it and can advise us.

And well, the chance for that became one of the five priorities on the workforce.

So that's aligned.

Yeah.

Well, and I'd like to uh extend on to what the councilwoman said.

There was a time mold enough to know there was a time.

Um in the early 2000s, where I know when I was at the chamber, if if we were talking to if there was a business that was coming in, um, at the time, we could work with the community college to create some specialized workforce training so that that company that was being you know coming in and when we're when we hear uh Jeremy say something about uh AI is equaling in his mind 20 percent unemployment.

How I'm not sure I know that I don't know what what jobs are are being forecasted to eliminate.

I'm sure I could speculate, and I'm sure there's been studies and things.

Um so how proactive are we are we being as a community to be training people now and offering all sorts of community-based training, whether it's in person or online, what have you, in preparation for some of those as well.

Yeah, good point.

Proactive role as far as identifying those jobs that may disappear and offering the type of retraining uh for those individuals.

And I guess just to add and piggyback, um, we're hearing that there will be a need for folks in the trades, that the trades are gonna go through their silver tsunami, and so we're gonna be in the need for plumbers, electricians, carpenters, you name it, um, for building and sustaining things long term, and so I think sometimes we forget that the traditional jobs that we have come to know for a long time will still be there, and they actually provide a very livable um amazing um upward mobility to our community.

So, how do we also not lose sight of how we can make a win, even though there may be some we I guess it's about transitioning people in and out, but I I mean to your point, it's about knowing what the jobs of tomorrow are available and then working with our with everyone.

I think it comes with our workforce board, our institutions of higher learning, um LVGEA, our chambers, because I mean I think as a collective, we just bring more lenses and can vet these areas thoroughly.

But mayor, you had something to say.

Um well, I just want to make sure that we're not uh again with the resolution.

Yeah, well, uh it this is our reservation, actually.

But um I you know, when it comes to training for um the jobs of the future, I don't think at the city of Las Vegas of the City Council is not gonna be doing that.

It's providing the resources to uh those groups and organizations that can in fact do that.

And so I think it's very like health care.

I mean, that we could uh create thousands of jobs with health care.

Construction, you are a hundred percent right.

We're hearing that uh there's a tremendous dearth of um people going into the trades, and it's a good solid job uh uh and make a good income.

And uh so I think we need to be if we have our economic growth and development, and if we're approving, which we do at every city council uh meeting, uh new businesses and new uh apartment complexes and single family housing.

Um we are creating an environment for the building trades to thrive.

And I think that's what we need to focus on is what is our role and responsibility in doing exactly what Olivia said, uh preparing people for um the next alliteration of jobs, and we have no idea what um uh what AI is gonna do or bring, and I agree with look, uh there was a time when uh you know we that valet parkers were the highest paid people on the Las Vegas strip.

Uh that's a job that is uh not particularly attractive now.

I understand that they're gonna people are gonna be getting their own drinks.

I work my way through uh college and law school cocktailing.

Uh that's uh I don't think I could do that in the future because they're gonna have uh you know um people will get their own drinks from a machine.

So that's gonna take out a whole bunch of service jobs that we've uh that I thought would be with us forever, and the personal contact and everything else.

Right now, that's just not part of the bottom line.

Um, but let us again be very uh careful of what we promise as a city that we can deliver.

Mary and I think that's a really good point, and that needs to be reflected how this is operationalized.

I think those points are well taken too, because basically at the when the outcome comes, you don't want to be held responsible for something you don't have any control over.

We have no control over.

Input, yeah, and and influence and convening and all those other things.

And to your point, uh councilwoman, yeah, the community colleges focused in the whole old areas.

Remember, we had a list of like the top 10 jobs, community college, it made over 100K.

You know, so these trade jobs that are so important, right?

Anything else under this economic development?

Again, to give input and direction to staff.

This is just your initial direction.

Okay, public safety, the the last area we have there.

In three to five years, when you start talking about public safety, what do you what are the outcome?

More place of fire stations.

More policy.

So can you measure, yeah.

And can you just add some context to that request, Councilman Polinski?

Just because um it's different.

Obviously, ward one, three, and five, we've been around the block a lot longer, but can you expand as to for you two, four, and six, what that means?

Two, four and six are still growing, particularly six.

Uh, the outskirts of town are now becoming suburbia, and we don't have that infrastructure there.

So rooftops come first and then commercial and then these resources.

So we need to be diligent in planning that for the future.

And so probably also looking at in those districts to response time, right?

Of course.

I would want to know how we can if we are will be equipped to move the needle in terms of um deploying more technology like camera, brighter lights, infrastructure, I guess public public safety infrastructure.

I know I've been in conversation with our fire teams, and they also basically say as we make the city more dense, we also will need to buy more equipment for them to get there in a time of a fire of a mid-rise.

Do we count with those units to serve those residents in the moment of need?

So for me, it's about how are we going to continue to keep our public safety arms deployed with cutting-edge tools and technology and rigs that are not very inexpensive and take a really long time to build.

I I heard from our fire chief, may take anywhere from I don't know, three to four years to get a new fire um rig.

And so that's a lot of time.

So we have to be very intentional and we have to know where our dollars and cents are and kind of be planning uh making sure that we're not missing any communities on the way.

And I had two one one is I can't remember the name.

When they went to the fires in LA, the wild wildline fires, wildline fire response.

That's something that we're gonna have to grow that we'll probably need to see an outcome on the next three to five years based on what happened in LA is making sure that doesn't happen here.

Um and then the second is with our DPS team, we've seen an expansion of how they're responding to the priorities really of this council, the priorities of the entire city, specifically related around some of the unhoused encampments.

And I would like to see us continue to support those efforts and growing that responsibility because I think you'll see a happier response or happy happier constituents in our area, knowing that there's uh response to them.

Right.

So more and more teams?

Sorry, conditions, conditions.

Something you might also kind of want to look like, you know, do you and uh council uh Kelly and I talked about this was you know, the do you feel safe walking around at night?

You know, is that is that you have a benchmark in three to five years, do people feel safer walking around?

It's the thriving districts, like if if you if you if you're walking over people downtown, it's it's not thriving.

No, and so we we have got to stay on top of that.

Yeah, yeah.

And that's very much a part of uh um the when I was campaigning and I knocked on a door and um the it was a nice neighborhood, uh you know, it wasn't the highest up scale, it wasn't the ridges, but it was uh a very nice neighborhood, not a gated community.

And the woman at the door told me she can't, you know, that the homeless sleep on her lawn at night and they in the morning they use her garden hose to clean off.

She can't send her our she can't send her children out to play, and and that's not right either.

And so uh we do need to that's why addressing this homeless issue has everything from economic development to public safety and everything.

And just satisfaction of living in a country.

It just um and uh how are you gonna you know uh uh walk your neighborhood or or walk down Main Street if you're gonna be accosted or even on Fremont Street.

Now I've seen in the last several months tremendous changes and uh or even gradual changes that I've seen for the positive.

Um, but we need to continue with that because uh look uh even though we want to diversify our economy, and I think that's very important.

The fact is we have a tourist-based economy, and if people are gonna go home and say that they didn't feel safe or they were accosted, or um somebody tried to pick their pocket, that does not that's not good for our city, and that's not good for jobs, and uh you know, if we don't have tourists, we're not gonna have jobs.

And I think um another public safety prong, if you were um done, Mayor, sorry.

Oh, I am done, absolutely.

Um I think we need to um assess our code enforcement um department to see if we have enough.

I know it's a um an uh department that struggles to keep people there because it's a very difficult job because you have to go continually telling people what they're doing wrong and how they need to rectify it, and it it's a really grueling sometimes thinkless job, but it's a very important job in our community.

So when I wanted us to take a deep dive and assess if we have enough code enforcement response for the number of complaints and folks that are in a certain district, and then also take a deep dive and figure out if we can find more efficient ways to execute our actions.

I feel that we're constantly chasing our tails with a vacant home.

We board it up.

My my residents tell me five minutes after you guys left and boarded it up, the boards come down.

So are there better practices that give us more bang for our buck?

Yes, it may be more costly to deploy, but can it last more than five minutes of keeping that house guarded from elements that shouldn't be in the home because then it's getting colder, they're gonna light fires in there, and then all the other neighbors are at risk for that fire catching on to their property.

And for me, it's a real real concern when we're constantly chasing with homes that are stuck in probate, with homes that are not being done anything with.

Um, and I constantly hate that.

Like I'm getting the signs like um activity that's wrong is happening, activities that's wrong is happening, and then the next thing I read in my email, uh, house has been torched, house was lit on fire, and then we have a missing, I call it missing teeth effect in our community because now that home is gonna probably be bulldozed because it's been torched, and now you have this just concrete pad between homes, which doesn't add any kind of anything to our neighborhood.

So any value.

So I just want to make sure that we are kind of keeping up with the times.

Are we effective strategies?

Effective strategies and better coordination amongst our fire, our police, our um code enforcement with health department.

I think that there could be we could be more in lockstep with each other to prevent having to chase our tails so long often and then lose that asset.

Um so I just want to be more preventative and then also it makes neighbors not feel that anxiety for so long because they feel like they're getting nothing accomplished on that front.

You know, I I think my colleagues have spoken to an issue very clearly that we face in Ward Five, especially in the older uh southern part of the neighborhood, which abuts two, one and three.

I'd like to digress a little bit and talk about public safety from uh the perspective of pedestrian safety.

We have some of the highest rates of human beings being killed on our roads, um children being hit um and killed on our roads, and um I think I would like us to also look at public safety from a perspective of um a car is um an inanimate object and the people who live in our community are the value and we appear to value vehicles right now over people, and it's it's in the DNA of the expansion of the United States to the West and it was car culture.

I think that we not just Las Vegas, not just Las Vegas.

I'm from California, but I have lived here most of my life, and I I it is a true thing, but I think that we have with our relationships with um the RTC and other local organizations, we can play a role in in changing that culture by our actions to bring value to human beings using space.

We want healthy communities, but we have no safe place for people to walk if they're on a major thoroughfare.

Um I don't know if you've ever walked on a street like Martin Luther King.

Um just to go for a walk in the morning.

My husband and I used to go on Sundays and cars blow by at 60 miles an hour at six o'clock in the morning.

It's horrifying.

So how do we build a sense of community?

When you talk about people feeling safe to be in their community, that's part of a community.

Those old neighborhoods w are in the path of all these major thoroughfares, and I think we concentrated so much on moving vehicles that we forgot about pedestrian safety about the people.

And so I think that pedestrian safety um is also really important for us to build community.

How do we break down walls and give people space um to be out and about?

That's what makes communities communities.

Okay, so uh an anything else.

So are we comfortable with that?

These are the five uh priorities at this point, because the next step is will you use your three dots and uh and go up and put your three dots.

What not not you can't put all three in one.

You have to put one per priority.

Um thank you.

And again, just to reemphasize Ken the priorities you're adopting, the possible outcomes.

That is just a direction you're giving staff.

You're gonna review these plans.

So you'll see how it's operationalized.

We're just talk we're just focusing on the issue of the broad priorities.

So with that, you have three dots.

Uh um I need four dots.

Uh it was a resource issue.

They'd only give us three dots per uh budget, sorry.

There's budget issue.

I I add for four, they said only three.

Sorry.

Uh with that, it just uh uh is interesting capacity to do all of that.

I don't have time.

So I think for the station is what we want to say.

Yeah.

Okay.

Oh, there's a mess over here.

Well is that me, sorry.

Um, we open it up.

Yeah, they probably will say any of that.

I'll let you know when we're ready to do that.

Oh, we're not ready yet?

No.

I said once we try to get to like how they cluster and before we get a verbal commitment that there's three, four, or five, maybe just opening it up and I love that.

Okay.

Okay.

We're gonna open we're gonna open it up.

We're gonna open it up for some discussion before we vote.

Can we also ask Mike if it's going to comment on anything?

Oh, I I well, I don't think he's so inclined.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah, okay.

Um we take another five-minute break?

Okay.

Um we're gonna take another five-minute break.

We will be back at 215.

All right, yeah, so they are.

Um so what we're doing right now, so here were the results.

And before we finalize, the mayor would like to have a brief cut public comment on these five areas.

Then we will come back and we're all we're gonna adopt the purples.

Right.

So right now, you had um uh seven votes for economic development.

We'll work smith, whether that's economic development and workforce development, what the title is, because that's important to adopt.

Uh public safety had five, healthcare at five.

Interesting, that's your top three anyway.

Then you had um uh uh four under uh attainable housing and zero under healthy and livable communities.

But right now, if the mayor would like to have a public comment, then we'll come back there and you we'll be adopting the purple.

Um, as you're all aware, um we usually do citizen participation at the end of the meeting, but I think it is so important, and I've been so impressed that so many people have been here since the beginning of our meeting, and I think it would be very important to have some community input.

You've heard everything we've heard.

Um, we'd like to know what your opinion is.

If you don't mind, um I know people have opinions on everything, but what I would like to do is um ask you to please speak on topic.

Uh, we're trying to figure out the priorities of the city for the next three to five years.

If you were sitting where we are, what would you what would you how would you be leaning?

What would you be recommending to our city staff?

And with that, um, we'll do uh how many people would like to speak.

Okay, in that case, let's do two minutes each.

And if you don't mind going to the microphone, identifying yourself by name, and uh letting us uh uh get the benefit of your input as well.

So who would like to go first?

Second, okay.

Go ahead.

And thank you so much.

Thank you, sitting council, for convening us here today.

Um I have been a citizen of Las Vegas for 20 years.

Can you give us your first and last name?

Armando Garcia.

Thank you.

And I would like to discuss what public safety means to our community as the discussion feels too broad today.

To call back what councilwoman Summers Armstrong and Diaz stated.

There are elements in our community that make us feel unsafe.

And they do have root causes that cannot be solved with enforcement alone.

Our community does not feel safe when we cannot afford to heal, or when we can, we cannot afford to miss work.

Our community does not feel safe when we feel like we will be homeless because we did not make enough money in that month.

Our community does not feel safe when our families are separated by a weaponized tax force.

In the past year, international tourism has dropped 15% in our city due to ICE presence.

The city of Las Vegas has also introduced punitive financial measures against our unhoused community members.

And pavement has covered more of our natural desert basin.

There is a lot to tackle here, and I hope the city council takes the opportunity to not only work with our community, but for our community.

Las Vegas is an incredibly diverse city and a metro area with a vibrant tourist economy that we all rely on to live.

This is all put at risk by Trump's ICE department, which currently has more people without a criminal record than with one in their custody, and have recently admitted to racially profiling our community members.

I'm asking you all on this city council to make a public commitment to not collaborate with ICE, to not use city resources for immigration enforcement, and to keep our city safe for all, regardless of immigration status and including our international tourists.

Thank you.

Thank you so much.

Hi.

I just want to um hi uh thank you, counsel, for uh for letting me have a chance to introduce myself.

My name is Joseph Martinez.

Um I've been uh living in Las Vegas for about three years now.

Um I uh I'm a delivery driver for for Amazon, and this delivering has showed me so much of our community and the diversity that Las Vegas has.

Um Pauli Gonzalez Park is my favorite place to take my lunches at.

I um usually around like three, three uh three thirty.

Uh you'll see an Amazon van there.

That's me.

Um you can say hi.

Uh I have been blessed by the community members there who um, despite not knowing my name, um, have given me food, have given me water, um, have tried to support me and other delivery drivers.

Um, and this is a community of for this is a um we we have uh in Vegas a community that is willing and wants to be um inclusive and wants to uh see this uh diversity through uh Paul Gonzalez uh I um I didn't really know who she was, but I on one of my lunch breaks, I read um her plaque and that's on at that park.

Um and what stood out to me was that she was uh one of the first, if I'm if I remember correctly, she was one of the first uh Latina uh Latino um spokesperson uh um newscasters, thank you.

Newscaster um in um and when I hear about uh like what was said before about the um our feeling of of public safety, um I'm scared that we are losing this uh culture uh through uh fear of being outside of having that community.

I I love that the I love the fact that like there are community members that take care of me despite not knowing who I am, and I don't want to lose that because um our citizens are afraid to go outside because of um you know racial prejudice.

Um I want to say before I before I finish, one thing that I've been extremely grateful on is the fact that everyone here for the most part seems to be um uh uh wanting to tackle the underlying issues that that we are facing, and so we ask that uh when looking at things like public safety, uh that you realize that um the increased ICE ICE enforcement in our communities are not uh protecting us.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

Good afternoon, council and mayor.

My name is Sebrazia Spencer.

I am a mother of three and a healthcare worker here in Las Vegas.

I've been living in Vegas for over 10 plus years.

Families like mine are working full-time and still falling behind.

Rents keep climbing, Nevada Energy keeps raising rates, child care is out of reach.

Buses don't run when we need them, and in our hospitals, patients and workers are at a stretch because staffing is stretched to a thin.

This all plays a role in our communities as I see that y'all was talking about health care and improving things to fix it.

Being a healthcare and overseeing, you know, dealing with ratios such as one nurse, one CNA to 26 patients.

We are burnt out.

We try everything in our care to provide the ultimate care to our patients, to you guys' loved ones, but are unable to to patient ratios.

We are the people who make this city run from cooks, CNAs, cleaners, teachers, bus drivers, mailman's, postmans.

We are Las Vegas.

I am asking you to put the people first to put a cap on utility and child care costs.

So families aren't price aren't price gouged.

Make safe pace in your patient ratios de law.

And invest in housing, child care and transportation.

So working families can stand on their own feet.

As being a mother of three, you know, I look forward to my children going outside in our communities and you know, collaborating with other children, being creative, you know, seeking a higher education to be successful men and women in this day of age.

I see significant numbers of it drop down in this economy in this generation, as I am only 24 years old.

Thank you so much.

Um thank you for the opportunity to address um this organization.

My name is Barrett Smith.

I'm a retired educator.

Um I love this process, and I do agree that it's unfortunate that you only had three um green buttons to put onto these boards.

Um but it's understandable.

I mean, you've got to keep the priorities, you know, small so that you can reach those goals.

Um attainable housing seems to be really a huge problem in this community.

I've only been in this community for a year.

Um I arrived here October 15th of last year, but that seems to be a problem um as you're stepping over individuals in your while you're walking on a sidewalk.

And so if you want this city to succeed, you have to be able to support your young population with affordable housing that is compatible with the wages that they earn.

Um it has to be a priority.

Thank you so much.

Okay.

Hi, thank you for the opportunity to speak.

Um, my name is Brandon Figueroa.

I've been born and raised here for almost 30 years.

Um so um I just had a couple ideas based on the conversation that I overheard after lunch.

Um, but I appreciate you guys for being committed to serving our community.

Um so in terms of um the unhoused um issues, um, I think that you guys are right to sort of tackle it from a rehabilitation standpoint.

Um I believe that uh an excess of force doesn't really fix the problem, it sort of just makes it more criminalized.

The you know, I'm part of a lot of orgs that we um we help like feed the homeless.

Uh we have like fundraisers, um, and so of the biggest kind of pitfalls that we fall into is that um a lot of the encampments are constantly moving, so we have to constantly keep up with where they're at.

Um we have to avoid a lot of enforcement sometimes because a lot of people, you know, criminalize our kind of help.

So any kind of um pushes to kind of help us not face those things would be super helpful.

Um, in terms of like AI development and trying to get like jobs back on track, maybe pivoting people's positions to be more of like an upkeep or like a technician to help uh run the automated services better, you know, so that way they're not really losing their jobs, they're sort of just transitioning their skills to be more um servient to the changing economy and all of the technological needs that are sort of arising.

Um then at the end, um I know that uh for like public transportation, you guys said that like funding might be an issue.

If you guys are open to the idea of like fundraisers, you know, there's a thriving art community that um is super passionate about all of these things, and they would be super down to entertain people with like events, music, you know, paintings, comedy or whatever.

Um, and you can use that as sort of like a a way to not only involve you know us as citizens to be more directly involved with funding things, but we can also use it to educate people on the issues that really are plaguing the community.

Um and then also to sort of add what you guys said to the um how do we make like the streets safer, people are like speeding like through like Martin Luther King and stuff.

Um there's a neighborhood that my mom works at because she's like a housekeeper.

I have to give her rights because she doesn't drive.

Um but they have like a sign that says, like, you know, drive like your kids live here, right?

So I think like helping humanize people's experiences as they're driving to make that feel like it's their home too, you know.

Um that could help them sort of feel more um, I guess like responsible when it comes to those moments of like, oh, I don't care, I'm just gonna speed through this intersection because there's nobody here.

Thank you so much.

Uh, did you have one more?

Oh no, no, that's not okay.

Thank you very much.

Thank you guys.

Hi, I'm Tiffany Stoik.

I spoke a little bit earlier, so you already know how I feel about ICE, but I'll just say it again.

Please know collaboration with ice.

Kidnapping people off the streets does not make us safer.

The other thing I want to see is say is that I'm disappointed to see that healthy um livable communities has not gotten any dots.

I think there's a lot of items in this priority that actually address public safety.

Um, and I also think that healthcare is kind of a little bit of a weird category right now.

It's very split between sort of the economic business side of healthcare as well as the um actual like healthiness part of healthcare, and I would maybe suggest splitting it up so that parts of that go under economic development and parts of it go under healthy and livable communities.

Thank you.

Thank you so much.

Is there uh okay?

Please go ahead.

Hello, my name is Tiffany Malonis.

I was born in Henderson, but grew up in the Bay Area.

I came back in 2010 to take care of my grandmother who was just diagnosed with lung cancer, who was also responsible for my grandfather, who was a quadriplegic.

So they definitely needed help.

Um since being out here looking after them, I myself had an uh have an autoimmune disease that just exacerbated while taking care of my grandparents because there was nothing available.

And with my down with me being sick, everybody suffered.

But the sorry, I'm losing my mind.

Um the issues that I personally had trying to get employment while sick to help support my grandparents.

I one point had to go through chemotherapy, and the job I was at wouldn't allow me to wear a wig.

Um times that I had to get treatment at UCM after my chemotherapy treatments, I was forced to wait outside because they weren't offering any tickets, which I know that they do because I worked at Whittleseabell doing time sheets, but for some reason they didn't think that I was worthy of getting a ticket back to Henderson so I could recover, but I had to wait outside of the hospital for three hours before somebody can get me.

I have lost a lot of doctors in the state because of the school system, establish a doctors who once their kids hit middle school, they are out because they want better for their children.

Thank you so much.

Oops, hi Karen Newcomer again.

Um I did speak earlier, but there are just a couple things I wanted to reiterate.

And interestingly, she brought one other one to mind.

When we had our break at lunchtime, and you could go outside.

Um, one of my friends had been out there, but he couldn't come in until after, so I went out to join him.

And when it came outside, they wouldn't let us stand in front of gather in front of the door.

They made because there were school buses there and they didn't want us, you know, to be involved with the children or something.

That makes sense.

But there was a lady out there by herself sitting on um one of the benches out there with the cane, a very frail looking lady, and they made her go stand over in that park.

And that and they when I told them later, you know what?

I understand policing a community and rules are rules, but I hope you would they would be able to have the autonomy, the uh responsibility or authority to make a decision like that.

A little frill lady with the cane isn't gonna be a with cops right there.

Actually, it turned out that when we went and stood on the other side of the school buses where they couldn't see us, the kids walked right by us.

It would have been safer to have us over here where the cops were.

But anyway, that's beside the point.

Today, Donald Trump said the military should use some US cities as training grounds.

He said that to our generals that they had called this emergency important meeting to.

That's why we're scared.

For the first time in my life, a couple months ago, I I had lot of you know snipers on roofs pointing guns at me, live ammunition pointing guns at me.

There's no reason for that.

We had done nothing illegal.

We're mostly grandparents.

We don't need to be treated that way.

I know we have uh No King's Day coming up again.

And as far as I know, we're the only city that we can't get our police our law enforcement authorities to allow us to get okay that we have our thing that day.

It's gonna be so embarrassing if Las Vegas is the largest city that the cops or the law enforcement, local law enforcement won't work with this.

They're supposed to protect us, they're supposed to be on our side.

I understand what is happening with ICE, but we shouldn't let our own local law enforcement treat us like this.

There are, you know, there are sons and daughters.

They don't want I don't believe that they want to treat us like that.

But instead of having hundreds of cops uh out there when we have a peaceful protest standing there threateningly at us, I don't understand that why they aren't doing code enforcement or something good with their time.

We don't need to be police like that, and it scares us that we are.

Thank you.

Thank you so much.

Is there anybody else that would like to uh say a few words?

Hello.

Hello, my name is Spencer Hinton.

I've lived here for most of my life.

I work in entertainment essentially, building stages, so I'm in and out of a lot of different properties throughout the city.

And the uh category that I'd like to comment on kind of touches, well, the topic I'd like to comment on touches on multiple of these topics.

Um it is common for citizens to feel unsafe when they're walking around areas where there are a lot of homeless people or even homeless encampments.

But we have to ask ourselves what about these people that are on the streets, they're citizens too.

Do they feel safe?

Do they feel supported?

Do they feel protected?

They have limited support from the city.

And in addition to that, they are getting more and more criminalized simply for being in the worst period of their lives.

They need help, not handcuffs.

Thank you.

We have time for one more.

Oh, two more, and then we're gonna cut it off.

Madam Mayor, my name is John Ballister's ward six.

Um I hope we haven't missed the boat on possibly getting a uh data center put in here.

Just a couple months ago, I drove by Boise.

They had this huge facility being built there for as a data center.

MADA did.

I hope we didn't miss that boat that would provide jobs.

I know there's some trade-offs here and there when it comes to incentives for these builders to build, but it will definitely be a guaranteed uh positions or job opportunities for the trades.

And just recently I've paid my property taxes, I looked at it, and school district got a thousand dollars off of me, which is fine, but I don't think I'm getting a good return on investment.

I know the gentleman there said you can't really own the education part of it, but I'd like to see a little bit more return on my dollars.

I'm a retired fire captain, and we had many uh tradespeople go in the fire service.

But because of my experience in the fire department, we can expand.

I could expand and do a lot of things.

Public speaking, uh public education, things of that nature.

But I'm just hoping that we would concentrate on education, because it will definitely bring down the crime.

It will definitely uphold or uplift the community for um services and reliable employees, especially.

I I don't like going into a company and I have uh an employee kind of shining me on and saying, eh, whatever.

No, I want customer service.

And from that, I think it derives from a good education, one, and I means to keep the family unit together.

There's an importance in having fathers and the and full families, atomic families thriving in a city to contribute.

That's my two minutes.

Thank you so much.

Okay, last speaker.

All right.

Um hit a couple topics um regarding uh our homeless community in other cities that have put money into housing for those who aren't housed.

It ends up saving 30 to 40 percent of the budget that you spend on law enforcement.

You say your name real quick.

Oh, sorry.

My name is Michael Rollins, I've lived here for 20 years.

Um but you know, putting money into housing for the unhoused ends up saving the city money versus spending money on clearing out camps and all these different things that you have to spend money on versus create housing, provide services at that housing to get them back into jobs, could save a lot of money and clean up the community.

The other topic, um I work in entertainment.

I was with CERC for almost 20 years.

Now I'm at uh universal horror unleash at Area 15.

Um, of course we have a tourist economy, but ICE actions around the country have dropped tourism nationwide.

And you know, we also have you know, we have tourists who are from other countries who have accents.

I don't want them to be a target.

We have community members from other countries who have accents who could be targeted, and we want to make sure that our law enforcement responds appropriately to any ICE actions in Las Vegas.

So if they are breaking the law, we want our law enforcement to respond to them.

Thank you.

Thank you so much.

I thank all of you for your input and Tom.

Okay, uh Mayor and Council.

So uh it looks like we have um four clusters.

Uh your three previous priorities have top came came to the top.

Uh and it looks like uh attainable housing is a close fourth.

So um you don't necessarily have to take a vote, just give direction, or you could take a vote, Mayor.

Um it's it's not important.

Appropriate to have a vote.

That's what we do.

Um so I would say public safety seems to make clear, and that was your previous title.

Uh question about economic development.

Economic development or economic development and workforce training.

Is it just wordsmithing because we're adopting the purples?

So are you good with economic development?

Umbrella.

Uh and it's the umbrella.

And this fits under it, or do you want the title to have workforce in it?

Good with economic development.

Economic development.

Okay, uh and declare workforces under it.

Health care is a standalone attainable housing.

Yeah, four.

It's fourth.

For just housing.

Yeah, just housing.

How uh attainable house.

Uh, how about housing?

Housing.

And that would be um the unhoused and and single family, also uh addressing the housing shortage and everything else.

Simple.

Just housing.

Housing.

Madam Mayor, and um yes, ma'am.

What about why why not consider calling it housing and homelessness?

That's what I actually that was what I put down at the beginning.

I housing and homelessness, unless somebody has uh an issue with that.

That's good.

Okay.

Um so those are the four healthy and livable communities.

I mean, you know, you obviously can do a fifth one, but you know, the more priorities, the less resources you have.

It it didn't receive any of the top votes.

Yeah, and um it's not that these aren't addressed, these are just your top priorities.

Okay.

I I'd like to make a motion.

Okay that we recognize the importance of strategic planning for the future of the city.

This is not the motion, this is the setup.

Uh uh we recognize the importance of strategic planning for our future.

Where are we going as a city in the next three to five years and what do we want to look like five years from now?

And I would ask that we vote on the top four um uh priorities, uh, which is housing and homelessness, uh, economic development, public safety, and um and health care.

And that uh that is my motion for the priorities.